


Peculiar and Pretty Plucky

by Signel_chan



Series: Plucky and Prideful-verse [4]
Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bullying, Disability, Everyone is Unique, Friendship, High School, Multi, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2018-09-30 08:52:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 53,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10159280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Signel_chan/pseuds/Signel_chan
Summary: For normal kids, high school's a time of growing and learning all about oneself and what's to come in the future. For kids like Owain, whose entire family works at the very high school he's attending, it's so much more than that. So, so much more.





	1. Placement Testing Woes

The constant ticking of the clock as its made its rotation was the perfect background noise for the classroom, the air silent except for the ticking every second and the occasion turning of a page as the students at the desks worked on reading through their tests. In the back corner of the classroom, his desk turned away from everyone else’s so that he could keep from distracting himself by watching them do their tests rather than do their own, Owain had his arm laid on the desk, hand palm-up, watching the way his fingers twitched from having already done a fair amount of the test’s writing.

“You’re never going to finish the exam at this rate, how are you expecting to get enrolled in the school if you have an incomplete entry exam?” the stern proctor of the test, one of the teachers at the high school that Owain knew fairly well, asked as she walked up behind him, her rolled-up exam instruction booklet in her hand. “You cannot rely on who your family is to be accepted into the school, you have to show some sort of attempt at placement testing.”

He didn’t reply to her, only falling forward in his seat and laying his torso and head on the desk next to his arm. She shook her head before walking away, checking to make sure the other students in the classroom were still hard at work on their tests. “I’m going to get in no matter what, test or no test,” he whispered to himself, turning his head so that he could see the words on the page of his test he’d left it open on. “Just because I’m not a good student doesn’t mean I can’t get in, my parents weren’t good students and _they_ got in, so I can too.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the first question on the page, one he had gotten a sentence into answering before his hand had cramped up to the point of being unable to continue. “I can’t do tests like this, everyone knows this, why am I here? Why am I having to take this stupid test right now?” His fingers were still twitching, feeling nearly numb as they moved without him even paying attention to them. “I’m smart enough to do this, I know I am, I just can’t take tests like this…”

Footsteps echoed back behind him, followed by a test booklet smacking him against the back of his head. “I was given explicit permission from your parents to be allowed to do that if you were caught slacking off,” the teacher told him, before she pulled a chair up next to his desk and sat down, smacking him again with her copy of the test as he sat back up and looked at her, confused. “What, did you think they were not aware that you would be in here with me for this? They made _sure_ that you were under my guidance for this exam, in case this exact situation happened.”

“My hand stopping working so that I can’t keep taking my test?” Owain glanced at his hand for a second, all the feeling in it from fingertips to wrist completely gone at the moment, before he was focused on the teacher once more. “Miss Miriel, this happens every time someone asks me to write more than a few words. And you knew about it?”

“I mentioned you must show some sort of attempt at the test, did I not?” Reaching past him to take his unfinished test booklet from him, Miriel closed it before she opened to the very first page, reading over what answers Owain had given in it with gentle murmurs of “interesting” or “well-put”. When she reached the last page he’d been on, with the single sentence written on it, she set the book down exactly as it had been when she’d picked it up, smacking him with her own booklet for a third time. “Your dedication to trying, as well as your creativity, show that you’ve given this test all you can. If you find yourself unable to write more during this period, I’ll make a note of the extenuating circumstances and attach it to the booklet. For now, though, please at least try to get more answers—I’m sure whoever grades your test would enjoy the humor.”

As she got up and pushed the chair away, Owain found himself staring slack-jawed at where she had been sitting, his eyes following her as she made her rounds around the classroom once more. “Huh, how about that,” he managed to say, turning his attention back to his test. “I guess maybe I could try to keep going, it’s nice to know that I’m not going to fail with what I’ve got but if she thought it was funny…” He laughed, bringing his non-writing hand to his mouth to stifle the noise to keep from being a disruption, while his still-twitching fingers reached for his pencil. “I’ve gotta see how many people I can make laugh with my answers. There’s no other choice!”

The bell ringing to dismiss the actual high school students from their classes signaled that the testing session was over, giving the kids in the room a few minutes’ break before they were back for the next part of the test. By that point, everyone else who’d been in the room was finished and waiting by the door for dismissal, minus Owain, who was mostly done but had given up on properly answering questions in exchange for writing stories in place of what the questions wanted as their responses. He’d jumped up at the sound of the bell, slamming his booklet closed and running it to Miriel’s desk, her having piled the other tests in an orderly stack that was just waiting for his on top.

She cracked a small smile at him when she saw his eagerness to turn in his exam. “I hope you took my words to heart and actually gave an attempt to blend correct answers with your particular brand of humor,” she said to him, watching him recoil as he realized he’d not done anything close to that. “Oh, at any rate, the person grading it will have a fun time. You enjoy your break time with the rest of the test-takers and make sure to return when they do. The next segment is a math-based one, so no long essays or answers needed.”

“Sounds good to me!” he replied, backing away until he hit a desk, then he turned around and ran for the door, leaving her to laugh for a moment before she started preparing the room for the next part of the test. He reached the door in record time and went outside into one of the halls of the school, an area that would normally have been flooded with lingering high school students if it hadn’t already been filled with the younger kids there taking their placement tests. There was a thought in Owain’s mind about ditching the area to go find one of his parents, but he knew there wasn’t enough time in the break to get to where they would be and back.

“Hey, Owain, how’d ya do on that part?” The voice asking him the question was coupled with a hand grabbing his arm and pulling him over against the wall, something he unwillingly did because he knew the speaker and the person touching him were not the same. “Those questions that required deep reading were really hard, don’t ya think?”

“I’d say they were incredibly difficult, but that’s just me.” That was the voice of the boy with his hand still holding Owain’s arm, an action he seemed to have no desire of stopping anytime soon. “What do you think, was it hard to you?”

Owain opened his mouth to give a reply, but the realization that he had no idea what questions they were asking about sank in and he was left awkwardly laughing. “I wish I could tell you I did good, Brady, but I don’t think I did. Because I didn’t actually do my test after, like, page two.” That had the first speaker sighing, burying his face in his hands. “But it’s not like I _had_ to do it, like you, Inigo.”

“I don’t have to do it either, we all read the first page where it says that if we’re taking the test, we’re already guaranteed acceptance into the school.” Finally letting go of Owain’s arm, Inigo took the opportunity to run that same hand he’d been using through his light gray hair. “I just want to say I did excellent so I can impress the girls we’ll be coming here with.”

“We…didn’t have to try hard?” Owain asked, his laughter fading as he now just felt incredibly awkward. “But she said, she told me we had to attempt the test to get into the school, but she also said me giving funny answers was a good idea too…”

“You really don’t like taking tests, do you?” Inigo was trying his hardest not to laugh at his friend, something made all the more difficult when Owain smacked himself on the forehead, leaning against the wall as he did so. “I should have known, only one of us in the friendship can be the smart one, and it seems like the smart one here also happens to be the good-looking and charming one.”

“So, me?” His voice muffled by his hands still covering his face, Brady pulled them down just enough to look at Inigo over his fingertips. “’cause I’m pretty smart, if me being here even though I’m a year younger than everyone else means anything.”

Inigo let out a single chuckle, nearly spitting on the two boys he was with as he did. “You, good-looking or charming? If you’re a year younger than us, that makes you…what, twelve? You haven’t started growing into a man yet, I’m afraid, and no girl is going to find you even slightly ‘cute’ with that nasty scar on your face.”

“N-nasty scar? Ma always says it makes me look older!” Beginning to whimper as if he was genuinely hurt, one of Brady’s hands moved back up to cover his eye that had the straight-line scar running over it. “Ya can’t blame me for that, or for being younger than you guys! I’m still smarter than you, I bet.”

“I’ll give you that point, it must take some serious smarts to be able to start high school a year early.” Inigo’s attention shifted over to Owain, who was still leaning against the wall in disbelief that he’d been tricked into trying harder on something he didn’t need to try hard on at all. “Say, Owain, how do you even know this kid anyway?”

Because Owain was a bit preoccupied with his mental breakdown, Brady went ahead and answered for himself, even though his voice was wavering and he was on the verge of tears as he spoke. “Me and Owain have known each other since I was a baby, our moms being best friends and all that. He’s kinda like a brother to me, and he’s my best friend, and if he was payin’ attention here he’d hurt you for makin’ me cry.” With that, the tears started rolling and Inigo was left staring at a blubbering mess of a boy standing right next to one that was completely unresponsive and ignorant to what was going on around him.

“I’m going to pretend like I don’t know either of you right now.” Looking around for someone else to talk to, Inigo sighed when he saw that the crowd of kids was already beginning to congregate around the door to the classroom they were testing in. “Or maybe not, looks like it’s time to get back to the testing thing. Let’s hope the next break we have doesn’t end up with someone crying.”

Sniffling, Brady said, “I’m only cryin’ because you’re a jerk. I don’t know why Owain thinks you’re as cool as he does, but I don’t see it.”

“He thinks I’m cool because I actually went to school with him, unlike you and your history with him.” Inigo stuck his tongue out when he heard more sniffles coming from Brady, but he dropped the gesture when he watched Owain shake his head and bring himself back to reality. “Look who’s decided to rejoin us! Is everything okay in that head of yours? You were out of it for a while there.”

“Everything’s fine, yeah,” Owain answered, still leaning against the wall and thinking about what he’d just gone through. In the time he’d been ignoring his friends bickering, he’d come to the realization that he was most likely going to do much, much worse than either of them on any of the tests they had to take, but thanks to the fact that he was already guaranteed a spot in the school that wasn’t too bad of a thing to have to deal with. So what if he’d end up having to take classes without them? He didn’t need to be with his friends all the time, he could do just fine on his own. “I just can’t wait to get done here today. Missing school’s fun, but not when we’re just taking tests somewhere else.”

It took a moment of letting Owain’s words sink in, but Inigo’s eyes went wide when he came up with something he thought the two might want to hear. Telling them would have to wait, however, as the moment he opened his mouth to suggest it they were summoned back to the classroom for the next segment of the test. With it being the math portion, things seemed to have gone over a lot better for them as a group, judging by how Owain wasn’t the last one done and he was able to leave the classroom on break at the same time as everyone else, rather than having to turn his test in at the start of the break, but when they were back in their same spot in the hall, there wasn’t any time for discussing numbers and equations.

There was only time for Inigo to look down the hall at the passing high schoolers and watch some of the older girls walking somewhere so foreign to him. “I don’t think I want to sit through the next test, if you know what I’m getting at,” he told Owain and Brady, both of them exchanging a confused look when they heard what he had to say. “I bet there’s a girls’ gym class happening in the next hour and I’d love to get to—“

“Uh, we’re not doing any kind of gym test,” Owain interrupted, completely missing the point. “Miss Miriel said it’s another writing part, which really sucks for me but what can we do about it? Tests are tests and we’ve got to take them.”

“I’ve always known you’re not smart, Owain, but seriously?” Inigo turned his head to give Owain a stare that showed that he thought his friend’s comment was dumb. “We don’t have to take anything if we don’t want to. All we need’s a reason to get out of the room, then I’m sure you know where the gym is from here. Mind giving your friends a tour?”

Scratching at the back of his head as he mulled the question over, Owain shrugged. “I mean, this isn’t really the time to be doing that, don’t you think? I bet if I asked my parents nicely, they’d bring us here some day and show us around themselves…”

The stare was broken when Inigo rolled his eyes, turning back to looking at the people passing down at the end of the hall. “I don’t want to be here without the older kids, that’s the issue here. When else would we have the chance to take a look around and see the sights, maybe have someone find us cute while we’re walking around? We won’t have that chance when we’re actual students here, we’ll just be the babies of the school. We have to do this now while it’s a possibility.”

“I think I get what you’re sayin’,” Brady said, before looking to Owain with a scared expression, “and I don’t think we should fall for it, Owain! He’s tryin’ to get us to skip out on the test to go look at girls!”

“Whoa now, I can’t do that! Just because I’m doomed to fail the test anyway doesn’t mean I’m going to ditch it!” Owain reached out and grabbed Inigo’s shoulders, shaking his friend back and forth for a few moments before one of his arms was slapped away. “What are you trying to do, get us kicked out before we even start going here? Can you imagine how bad that would be? I…I have to go here! My parents went here! My uncle’s the principal! I can’t get kicked out already!”

“No one said we’d get kicked out, not if we—“ Inigo dropped the volume of his voice as he gave the (in his mind) best part of his idea, “—had some reason to be roaming the halls. A good reason. Like someone being sick or hurt or something. Surely that’s not an excuse that would be ignored.”

Owain opened his mouth to reply, but quickly closed it when he realized he didn’t have anything to say that went against that idea. The only thing he could come up with was something to make it possible, by using his arm aching as a reason to need to leave the classroom, but suggesting that didn’t feel right to him. However, just because his friend was starting to fall for the trap didn’t mean Brady was going to as well. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said, trying to sound stern and serious even though doing that was rather hard when he was not intimidating in the slightest. “All of us aren’t going to be allowed to leave at once, and even if we were, wouldn’t the teacher make sure we get to where we’re going? I don’t really know her, but my dad does and he talks about how she can…oh you’re just gonna walk away, I see how it is.”

Somewhere in the middle of Brady trying to be the sensible one, Inigo had decided that he was going to go try looking at the high school kids for himself, heading down the hall to where it intersected with the one bustling with the older students. Owain had to fight with himself between listening to the explanation and following his other friend, and when he decided to follow Inigo’s lead that had left Brady standing there talking to the air. He didn’t follow the two, instead heading back to the classroom by himself with a dejected sigh.

“I know you just met the kid today, but you’ve really gotta not walk off while he’s talking,” Owain chided when he caught up to Inigo, them both reaching the end of their little hallway. “You might’ve made Brady cry, and I don’t think his mom’s going to like it very much if he goes home talking about how you made him cry. She’ll blame me, and I don’t want to be on his mom’s bad side. Bad place to be.”

“And you walking off while he’s talking is okay?” Hearing Owain stutter as he tried to come up with some response that somehow justified what he’d done, Inigo laughed. “Let this be known as his first taste of actual school, I suppose. He doesn’t want to hang with the big kids, he can go cry home to his mommy.” He feigned wiping tears from his cheeks, finding his actions humorous, so when he ended up getting kicked in the shin he wasn’t expecting it. “What was that for, Owain?” he snapped, dropping down to grab where his friend’s foot had just hit him. “I was making a joke!”

“You don’t pick on Brady when he’s not around. I won’t allow it.” Giving a loud huff as he glared down at Inigo, trying to decide if he had anything else to say, Owain froze in place when he looked back up and saw several high school students standing across the hall, having watched what he’d just done without a word. He slowly raised a hand to give them a small wave, the sounds of their laughter and questioning if the “little brats” were really fighting making color rise to his cheeks.

As he turned to run back to the classroom, Inigo looked at the group that was currently finding him getting kicked hilarious, his face going pale when he recognized one of the people in the group. He too raised a hand to wave, but the person in question he was locking eyes with gave a slight shake of his head, wordlessly telling him not to bother. He swallowed down hard and nodded, making a break for the classroom as well, a bit of a hobble in his step as he ran. Once they, and the rest of the kids that were supposed to be there, were back in their seats, the next part of the test was able to begin.

Halfway through the session, Owain was starting to regret dismissing Inigo’s idea like he had. The feeling of embarrassment he’d had from attacking Inigo in the hall had long since faded, but he was sure if he dwelled on being watched like that long enough he could make his cheeks go bright red again, which would make it rather easy to fake being sick. He couldn’t spare the time to think about that though, not when there was a test sitting on his desk that he needed to complete in some timely manner. “I’m still going to fail this thing,” he told himself as he gripped his pencil tightly enough to make his whole hand tingle, “but I’m going to actually try doing it. I’m not skipping out on a test because Inigo says so.”

Yet after the session was over and there was just one more test to go, he was back to considering that suggestion as a real possibility. “I don’t like when you’ve got that look on your face, Owain,” Brady whispered to him, breaking him from the train of thought he’d gotten himself lost on. “Normally it means you’re about to do somethin’ stupid, and if you’re doin’ it then I’m right there with ya on it, and I don’t know if I wanna know what you’re thinkin’ about this time…”

“What if Inigo’s plan isn’t that bad after all?” he replied, getting his friend to groan. “No, hear me out, what if it’s not? I mean, we don’t want to spy on the girls like he does, but I’m getting tired of testing and I’m sure you are too.”

“I am, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna break the rules to get out of it. Can you imagine if Ma found out I got caught skippin’ one of these tests? She’d choose to homeschool me for the rest of forever, because I couldn’t be trusted to do good here with you.” Brady gave Owain a terrified look, almost as if he was on the verge of crying at the thought of being stuck under his mother’s control in regards to his education. “I don’t know if I could handle doin’ that until I graduate, I really don’t!”

“Then it’s good we’re not going to skip the last test, I suppose.” Owain shrugged, grabbing Brady and rubbing a fist into the top of his head, ruffling his brown hair until it was a complete disaster. “We’re going to stick to what we’ve been doing all day, and then after this we’re done! Easy as that!”

They shared a laugh as Owain let go of Brady and allowed for him to try fixing his hair as best as he could with his fingers, but deep down they both were questioning how true that statement was. With the seed of adventure taking root in Owain’s mind, it was only a matter of time before he capitalized on it; all he needed was an opening to make a move.

Had they known that opening was going to be as simple as a loud sneeze in the middle of that last test, their confidence in them sticking to the testing would have been next to nothing. The sneeze itself hadn’t been the problem, just a minor disruption for the students in the room as they were trying to take their science test, but when the shaky statement of “Uh, I think my nose is bleedin’” came from Brady as he held his hand to his nose, that seemed to be like the biggest opening ever to Owain.

As Miriel stopped her rounds to inspect what had happened, Owain turned around in his seat and saw that Inigo was looking in his direction, almost as if he had been waiting for this same opening. With the adult in charge distracted, Inigo quietly got up from his seat and started tiptoeing towards the door, holding a finger to his lips to tell Owain to stay quiet, but the moment his hand dropped, the time to become an even bigger distraction was upon him. “Miss Miriel!” he called out, giving Inigo the opening to get the door opened and sneak out without being heard. “Does Brady need to go to the nurse’s office? I _do_ know where that is, if you want me to take him.”

“What a kind offer, but I think a few tissues will suffice to take care of this issue.” Already Miriel was heading to grab some tissues for Brady, not looking in the direction of the desk that had been emptied. “If it persists, however, taking you up on your offer might be a necessary action.” She was in the process of handing the tissues to Brady when he sneezed again, him grabbing what she had and holding them against his face, a smear of blood visible on his hand. He didn’t seem to be too bothered by what was happening, but she was looking from him to his desk that had a small splattering of blood on it and then over to Owain, who was still turned around in his desk, waiting for the cue to leave. “You know what, I cannot see you focusing on your test long enough to finish it, and the boy does need to wash up after this, so perhaps you can lead him to the restroom? There’s no need for a trip to the nurse’s office for this.”

“I can do that for you!” Owain cheerfully said, jumping from his seat and running to behind Brady’s, urging his friend to get to his feet so he could lead him to the door. “We’ll be right back, unless it gets worse then we’ll probably stay gone but I don’t know if that’ll happen or not!” He could hear her sigh at his loud proclamations, which made him feel a bit bad for everyone who was still taking their test at that point, but he really didn’t care too much about them. All he knew was that he had his way out of the class, and it was for a legitimate thing that had happened.

If only Inigo wasn’t right on the other side of the door, waiting for them to finally come out. “Took you long enough,” he said, smiling at the two. “And what a believable excuse, that blood looks more real than it should for something like this.”

“That’s because his nose is actually bleeding, Inigo. He’s not faking this.” A sense of needing to do what he’d been tasked with had overtaken Owain, and he was completely prepared to lead Brady towards the closest bathroom to get him cleaned up and back to the testing room, but when Inigo stepped in front of him, arms crossed over his chest as he shook his head, he knew that his intentions were going to be ignored. “Come on, can’t we at least go get him cleaned up?”

The head shaking persisted, Inigo looking at Brady’s current state with a small smile. “We can use his bloody nose as an excuse if we’re stopped on our way to the gym. Now show us the way, Owain, you’re the only one here who knows how to get there.”

“I don’t think I want to do that,” he said, his voice shaking as he fought with himself internally about what he was doing. He knew that helping Brady was the right thing to do, but at the same time, doing things with Inigo was always a fun time, because they were going against the rules and against all sense of right and wrong. “But…you know what, the day’s almost over, what’s so bad about going a bit out of our way right now? If we get caught, I know there’s a bathroom near the gym so we could say we were heading there. We’ll just show you where the gym is once we’re down there.”

“You’re not letting me go by myself, I’ll need backup there by my side to confirm whatever I see.” Inigo stopped shaking his head when he finally saw Owain let his shoulders drop in defeat, the blond boy saying that he’d do it after all. “That’s the spirit! Now, dear friend and said friend’s dear friend, which way do we go?”

Owain looked down the hall both ways, before gesturing to the left with his head. “This way’ll take us by the fewest classrooms, but we’ve gotta be careful because I’m pretty sure that, unless they moved rooms for some reason, Brady’s dad’s classroom is that way.”

“Are you crazy?” His voice altered thanks to him holding his nose to make sure it wasn’t going to bleed everywhere, Brady took a couple steps in the only other way they had to go. “I’m not getting in trouble by my dad catchin’ me out of the test! We’re goin’ this way if we’re goin’ anywhere at all!”

“But Brady, if we go that way, there’s so many other classrooms we could get caught walking past. I know you don’t know all the teachers like I do, but we really shouldn’t…” Owain sighed when he saw Inigo step to being alongside Brady, interlocking arms with him to make it look like he was doing a helpful service. “I guess we’re going to go that way, huh? So much for not getting caught, but when it happens, I told you so.”

“Stop your complaining, Owain, we’re not going to get caught unless someone hears your big mouth. Now grab your friend’s other arm, we’re going to make this convincing until we get close enough to the gym to see those lovely ladies!” Already starting to drag Brady along, Inigo didn’t wait for Owain to catch up, instead making him work for a place in the scheme to get to the gym. Once he was in a position to make it look like he was helping Brady move (despite the only ailment being a bloody nose), the three of them made quick work of getting down the hall and to where the older students had been watching them before. The main corridors of the school were done in a square, ultimately all leading to either exits or to the school commons, and with one turn they were headed straight for where the gym was located, having to only go down a long hallway with classrooms on both sides.

Nothing too problematic, not for students whose goal was to actually go where they’d been told to go. But for three younger boys who were ditching a test for two very different reasons, the situation was nothing more than a recipe for disaster, especially when they walked past the door to the copy room right as someone was opening it from the inside. If he’d been paying attention to his surroundings, Owain might have made note of that before it was painfully obvious who was coming out into the hall, but he was too busy focusing on staying quiet and quick on his feet to take a second look at that doorway.

“What in Naga’s name are you boys doing?” the voice belonging to the white-haired woman who’d pushed open that door asked, ending all notions that this endeavor was going to end well. “Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere right now? Say, in a testing room? With your classmates? Not roaming the halls like you are?”

“Come on boys, let’s run!” Inigo whispered to the other two, trying to pick up his pace to get out of the situation they’d stumbled into. “We’ve gotten so far, we can’t let ourselves get caught right now!” When he made it a few steps before being pulled back thanks to Brady having stopped walking, his speed not enough to pull the kid from where he now stood, he had no choice but to give up hope on what he’d been trying to do. Or he could have tried running for it again, sending himself slipping onto his back when, once again, he couldn’t get enough force to pull who was keeping him from moving. “Ow, I can’t say I deserved that…”

“Way to try and get out of getting in trouble,” Owain said, rolling his eyes at what Inigo had just done. “We’re trapped now. Aunt Robin got us.”

“Trapped? Did you figure someone would catch you while you’re trying to do, ahem, whatever it is you’re out here doing?” Laughing, Robin let the door to the copy room close behind her as she closed in on the three boys in the hall, bending down to look at Inigo as he lay on the floor. “I’m going to go ahead and assume this is the guilty party here, correct me if I’m wrong.”

“No, it was definitely that kid’s idea,” Brady replied, still sounding strange due to holding his nose. “He wanted to go look at girls in gym class.”

Robin smiled down at Inigo, who was glaring back up at her. “What an interesting thing to hear, someone wanting to go watch girls in gym! Wouldn’t it be funny if you’d made it down there just to find out that it’s only a boys class in there right now, so there wouldn’t even be any girls to spy on?”

At the same time Inigo said that that wouldn’t be funny at all, Owain realized what that would have meant for them, taking in a sharp breath at the idea of getting all the way to the gym only to have been caught in there by his own father. “I’m glad you found us then, Aunt Robin,” he said, trying to back away from the situation but finding the same problem that Inigo had when he’d tried to run: he was still locking arms with Brady. “You’re going to show us back to class and tell us not to do it again, right?”

“No, oh gods, I couldn’t let you three get out of this without learning something!” Still laughing, Robin stood back to her full height and looked between the three boys. Inigo remained on the floor, completely unamused, while Brady was beginning to tear up at the prospect of being in trouble at a school before he was even a real student there, and Owain’s lower jaw was shaking as he tried to find some words to use to ask for some forgiveness. “I’ll be leading you somewhere, but it certainly isn’t back to where you’re supposed to be.”

There was a silence between the boys, until Brady wailed, “I don’t wanna go to the principal’s office on my first day ever here! Please don’t get us in trouble like that, both my parents will kill me for it!”

“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t put you three on Chrom’s list of worries quite yet,” she assured him, getting a thankful sniffle in return, but the look she was giving Owain was making the blond boy shake where he stood. She winked at him, before adding, “I know just the place that’ll suit you for what you’ve done. Based on how one of you seems to be bleeding and one hit the floor rather hard while trying to escape, I’d say the nurse’s office is best.”

The breathless “no, please” that Owain managed to get out was overshadowed by Inigo, not reading the situation at all, making a sarcastic comment about how that was where they’d been told to go to begin with, so it only made sense for them to go there after all. “Y-you don’t get it, do you Inigo?” Owain asked as he watched his aunt shuffle how she was holding her papers to help his friend up to his feet. He shrugged in response, making him shake a bit harder. “That’s where my mom is, she’s going to be so mad when we walk in there ‘cause we’re in trouble…”

“Oh, I don’t think she’ll be mad, but she’ll definitely have something to say about seeing you boys in there before you’re actually students here.” Robin started leading them down the hall, checking behind her every couple steps to make sure they were trailing behind her. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure to keep the ‘ditching the test’ part out of my explanation for why you’re there, but this is a one-time offer I’m only honoring today. No exceptions.”

Based on how sincere she sounded when she said it, Owain figured it was best to heed his aunt’s word about this being their one free pass when it came to punishment in the school. He was sure Brady felt the same way, and he couldn’t be bothered to care about how Inigo felt because it was Inigo’s fault they’d gotten into this mess in the first place. “Thanks for not ratting us out, Aunt Robin,” he said once they got closer to his mother’s office, having her turn back to smile at him for the comment. “I’ll never forget this.”

“Yes, well, I’ll never forget it either, and neither will Chrom. Don’t think I’m not telling him what you three did, even if we’re not punishing you for it.” They were steps away from the heavily-decorated door to the nurse’s office, a sign visible in the window to knock before entering. Upon coming up to it, she gave a few hard knocks on the glass, watching the boys that had followed her wince at the sound, knowing that this would have been a source of punishment had kindness not been bestowed upon them.

The door creaked open, a cheery face peeking out of it that turned to a look of surprise when she saw the three boys standing there with Robin. “Oh no, what happened here?” Lissa asked, bringing a hand to cover her mouth as she looked from her son to his two best friends. “Did someone get hurt? Do we need to call some parents?”

Sometimes, having family that worked at a school was a great thing. Other times, it was the most terrifying thing in the world. Being escorted to his own mother’s office as a light punishment was one of those terrifying times, and Owain swore to himself right then that he would never find himself following those same steps down there again. If he ever had to come visit her during school hours, he’d do it because he was sick, not because he was a bad kid or anything.

Little did he know that, when school started that fall, it would take exactly half an actual school day for him to break that promise.


	2. Welcome to the First Day of the Rest of Your Life

The morning of Owain’s first day of high school went exactly as every morning of school had gone leading up to that one: he was left to sleep in until the absolute last minute, because no one wanted to wake him up and be yelled at due to disrupting his slumber. When his alarm went off, the same time as always, he grumbled as he struggled to turn it off, forgetting just how far from his clock his bed was and he fell out of bed, landing awkwardly on his face and one arm, but managing to get his alarm shut off at the same time. “Ha, nailed it,” he said to himself as his legs fell off the bed and joined the rest of him on the floor. “Now let’s hope that’s the only stupid thing I do today, shall we?”

He got up and quickly pulled on the outfit his mother had picked out for him to wear on his first day, something he resented her for doing but thanked her for at the same time. Coordination wasn’t one of his strong suits, and he was glad someone cared enough about him looking somewhat put together for the day, even if it was done in the most overbearing of parent ways. Once he was satisfied with how his shirt was half-tucked into his pants and how his collar was slightly popped, he opened his bedroom door and headed for the stairs up to where he knew his cousins were waiting for him to join them for breakfast.

“In record time today, Owain,” Lucina remarked when she heard the door at the top of the stairs open, not even looking to see the boy’s appearance. “Why, you might be able to actually eat something today if you really want to. Morgan’s already downed three bowls of cereal while we’ve been waiting, and I bet he’s itching for a challenge.”

“You’re not gonna eat a bunch to beat me, are you?” Morgan asked, eyeing Owain with equal parts suspicion and worry. When the blond shook his head, pulling himself out a chair and grabbing a single piece of toast as his breakfast, he sighed happily. “Oh good! Lucy said that you would and I didn’t want you to, she didn’t say that my bowls were all really tiny ones so I don’t make myself sick before school. Mom said I can’t eat too much before school or else I get too much energy and don’t focus, and Lucy didn’t want her to be made right.”

Lucina smirked, looking at her brother as if he was amusing her with every word. “More like, I didn’t want her being pulled away from school on the first day of classes because you couldn’t keep your breakfast down. Now go get your things, we’ve got to leave soon if we’re all going to make it to school on time.”

“Got it, Lucy!” Jumping to his feet, Morgan gave his sister a salute before running from the kitchen, heading straight to his room with nothing but enthusiasm.

“Did you really have to send him away?” Asking between bites of his toast, Owain might have been speaking with just enough food in his mouth to disgust his cousin to the point of her turning her head away from him. He swallowed down everything he’d yet to fully chew, nearly choking himself in the process, but once he’d taken a big drink from Morgan’s neglected glass of water on the table, he was right back to talking. “I love hearing how eager he is for everything. I bet being in his class at school today would be a lot more fun than being in any of my own.”

Lucina shrugged, looking at the nearest clock to make sure they were still on time. “High school’s not that bad, and besides, today is going to be filled with so much introduction stuff that you don’t need to worry about ‘fun’. You’ll have a blast getting to go through all of it and see everything as an actual student.” Since she was still turned away from him, he couldn’t see how she rolled her eyes at what she’d just said, but he could very faintly her muttering under her breath, “But once you’ve done it three times, a fourth time is more boring than class ever could be.”

“So they do this stuff every year? That means it probably doesn’t matter.” Despite Lucina gasping at his statement and trying to talk him out of whatever he was plotting, he continued on with his grand fantasy of getting out of the assembly that opened the school year, going so far as to start plotting how he and his friends would manage to get away without being caught. Given his knowledge of how the school was set up, he figured it wouldn’t be that hard to do.

For the duration of the ride to the school, after Lucina drove Morgan over to the elementary school he attended and dropped him off with a friendly reminder to “not be too weird” that day, she focused her attention on trying to talk Owain out of his plan to skip the assembly. “I promise you, going to it the first year you’re at the school is really important, you’ll learn a whole lot about everyone there and it’s indispensable information. Why, you could miss who your new favorite teachers will be by not being there, and I don’t think you want that.”

“I know all the teachers already, Lucy, I don’t need to be introduced to them through this. My favorite’s probably going to be whoever teaches the easiest class, or maybe Brady’s dad, since he’s cool.” Owain sighed, propping his arm up on the car door as they drove through the neighborhood, Lucina taking extra care to make sure she didn’t wreck the car her father had let her borrow for the day. “You can stop being an overbearing senior at any time, I think I can handle school without you.”

“You might regret saying that, once you’ve got a minute until a class and you don’t know the actual number for the classroom you’re supposed to be in. Who else will you go to if you need help then? You’re not one to swallow your pride and ask an adult, so wouldn’t big cousin Lucina be your first choice?” She glanced over at where he was sitting for a split second, seeing his disgusted face at the idea of him needing help, and when her eyes returned to watching the road she started to laugh. “I totally get why my father refers to you as a mini version of your father at times like this. You’re so stubborn and not very bright.”

“Hey, I’m plenty bright! I got into the school, didn’t I?” His chest rising in indignance, Owain shot a glare to Lucina, her laughter continuing as she saw it when she glanced at him again. “I mean, yeah I got in ‘cause of my parents and it had nothing to do with my tests, but I still got in! That’s not something a lot of kids can say!”

“That’s because most kids like you wouldn’t have that protection you did,” Lucina told him, being very blunt with her answer. “They would have failed the test, like you did, and been rejected because they wouldn’t be able to take anything seriously.” He winced, having never heard that he’d outright failed the test before she said it. “This is a school for underprivileged students with potential to do good things, and we’re only there because our family runs the place. Most of our friends are there because their families work there. There are exceptions, but with reason. Always with reason.”

Owain didn’t like when he felt like a failure, but hearing Lucina talk like he was being given a free ride into something he didn’t deserve was only making those feelings crop up within him. “S-so what you’re saying is that I should ask to go to the school a lot of my old classmates are going to. Since at least there I can be stupid and not taking up someone’s spot to be a good student.”

“That’s not what I was saying at all, don’t put words into my mouth like that.” Pursing her lips together, Lucina waited until she’d parked in the spot designated for the principal of the school—the spot she knew her father wanted the car in—before she said anything else. Those words came after having to relock the doors twice, Owain trying to get away before she could explain what she meant. “Stay in here, we’re still a few minutes early and you need to hear this. You’ve got a lot of expectations on your shoulders when you walk in that building. You’re the child of a beloved staff member, people are going to hold you to her status and you need to try your best to make her proud.”  
“She already knows I’m a failure, if you know it. What’s the point in even trying to do anything right now?” He went to unlock the door again, but hesitated when he felt himself starting to tear up. “I’m never going to amount to anything, Lucy. I shouldn’t be here.”

“As my father would say, you’ll have to amount to _something_. Your parents both did, so you can do it too.” She shot him two thumbs up before unlocking the doors herself, getting out of the car to grab her backpack out of the back seat. “Now come on, we should go inside before you start getting super self-hatred-y in the car and get tears all over everything.”

“I’m not going to cry over this,” he snapped, giving a loud sniffle that contradicted his words. “It’s the first day of school, I can’t go in looking like a crying mess. What kind of person even does that in high school?”

When they walked inside the front office and he heard the distinct noise of what sounded like someone getting over a hard crying session, he was quick to remember that he was best friends with someone who would, in fact, cry on the first day of high school. “I didn’t want to do it, after everythin’,” Brady said after Owain came up to him and grabbed him in the biggest hug he could manage. “Ma said I had to do it, she wasn’t gonna put up with me bein’ at home anymore, but I just didn’t wanna do it.”

“Hey, it’s okay, bud.” The reassurance was said half because Owain thought it needed to be voiced, half because he was sure his measly hug wasn’t doing much to help Brady out. Over the summer, one of the two might have hit a growth spurt that sent him towering over the other, and with that came an immediate bulking up to keep from looking too gangly, and as much as he would’ve loved for it to have happened to him, it wasn’t Owain that had been gifted with it. This meant that, for anyone who didn’t know the two boys, it looked like the younger friend was comforting the older one, when in fact the reality was reversed. “You don’t have to cry about being here. You’ve got me, remember? We’re going through this together, you and me. And Inigo too.”

Brady flinched at the sound of their other friend, shaking his head as Owain craned his neck to see what the expression on Brady’s face currently was, ultimately finding himself looking at someone who was slipping back into being just as upset as he initially had been. “He’s already come in here, he got here right after I did. Called me a crybaby to my face and made Ma yell at him for a minute before he ran off after a group of girls.” He sighed, worming an arm out of Owain’s attempted hug so that he could wipe his eyes. “I don’t think I wanna be hanging around him much today, or ever.”

“Eh, you might change your mind on that, especially after he stops being so girl-crazy and starts focusing on other things. What other things, I don’t know, but it’ll happen. It always does, like halfway through the semester.” Owain pulled himself off of Brady, but not before patting his back a few times to help get the last remnants of being upset out of his chest. When all that resulted in was getting a confused look, he took that arm back and let it hang by his side. “S-sorry, arm got a bit twitchy there, as it does.”

“That’s what the reason for it is, sure.” Sniffling one last time, Brady wiped the tears he’d collected on his finger on the side of his pants, before nodding at nothing in particular. “Mind goin’ with me wherever it is we’re supposed to go today? I don’t know much about how school works, and even though I bet we won’t have any classes together I’d still like to get to spend some time with my best friend.”

At the second verbal reminder of the day in regards to his intelligence (or lack thereof), Owain’s eyes shifted towards the floor, but he knew he couldn’t get hard on himself over not being smart again, not when someone was relying on him for some companionship. “We can head on to the assembly together, I guess,” he said, trying to move past the idea of his stupidity in the only way he could think of, that being rooting himself in what he should be doing; this resulted in him remembering that he simply did not want to go to this assembly they were supposed to attend. “Or…maybe we could go scouting out places in the school while there’s no one around? Like maybe—“

While he had been speaking, Brady’s eyes had gone wide and he was starting to shake his head, as if something had made him want to argue against Owain’s plan, but he didn’t manage to say anything before Owain was cut off. “I wouldn’t dare think about doing anything against the rules, sweetie,” Lissa’s gentle voice chimed in, overriding Owain’s words as he realized that his mother had come up behind him. “You two should be on your way to the assembly right now, anyway. You wouldn’t like it if you get bad seats and have to spend the entire time in the front row.”

“But Mo-o-om, we don’t want to go! Why are you going to make us?” Turning around so he could look at his mother while he spoke with her, Owain was quick to make note of her serious expression, something that didn’t fade even after a few moments of staring each other down. “Don’t you love me, Mom? Why aren’t you going to let me have any fun?”

She raised an arm and pointed it in the direction of the doors into the rest of the building, nearly knocking over a student heading in that same direction. “Not another word of it, Owain. You are going to that assembly and you’re going to realize just how fun it is.” He grumbled something under his breath that she didn’t catch, but she still pointed her finger towards the doors again. “Get to it, Owain. I’m not letting you go anywhere else.” As he started heading where she was telling him to go, she looked to Brady, who was staring at her slightly shocked, his jaw hanging open. “You as well, Brady. Don’t want me telling your mother you were breaking the rules, do you?”

“No way, ma’am! I’m goin’ right now!” He closed his mouth tightly and fell in line right behind Owain, who was walking as slowly as he could towards the doors. That had to change almost immediately, after Lissa caught up with them and started directing them where they needed to go. The amount of students still wandering around before the day started were few and far between, everyone having headed to where the year-opening assembly was, and she was going to make sure that her son and his best friend weren’t the last ones to enter.

If that meant having to physically steer Owain and Brady in the right direction, Lissa was just going to have to do it, and she did. “ _This_ way, boys,” she told them on several occasions as they started veering off-course, Owain’s reluctance to enter starting to drive him to want to make bad decisions. Once they were to the auditorium she showed them where they should have gone to sit, a section of the bleachers filled with familiar faces to both her and her son, but when they both dragged their heels she huffed and took her son by the wrist and dragged him there herself.

He was not happy to have been babied, especially not when people started snickering and giggling at having watched what had happened to him. “I can’t believe Mom did that,” he whispered to Brady as they took their seats, his friend shrugging at the displeasure because he understood why it had happened.

“Maybe if ya’d just done what she wanted us to do in the first place, there wouldn’t have been any of that to happen. Your mom’s a nice lady, she didn’t mean any harm to ya.” Brady put his hand on Owain’s leg and pat it. “At least she didn’t yell at you like Ma would’ve if she’d been here.”

“So that’s how your dear mommy is going to treat you this school year, eh Owain?” both boys heard Inigo ask, them turning to see him sitting a few rows behind them. Brady muttered something under his breath at the sound, but Owain’s eyes narrowed, eyebrows only furrowing further as the gray-haired boy stood up and pushed through the people sitting between them to take a seat right next to him. “Color me impressed, I figured she was going to be nothing but a pushover and a doting mother on you the entire time. Nice to see that she has some claws to bring out when needed.”

“My mom’s always been able to discipline me when she’s needed to,” Owain said with a sigh, turning his attention away from the unwanted intruder and towards the auditorium floor, where the assembly for the day was moments away from beginning. He could feel himself wanting to jump up and flee the room, especially after he saw not just his mom but his dad, his aunt, and his uncle all standing up at the front of the room, standing and talking with several other adults that he recognized from years of having been immersed in this school’s culture. He didn’t want any part of what they were about to put them all through, not when he knew his parents well enough to know that if they were given the chance, they’d call even more attention to him than his dragging to his seat had.

Once everyone had gone to their seats, the assembly began with the lights in the auditorium dimming down to near-darkness, as the wall across from everyone lit up in a screen playing an old video for everyone to watch. The older students, most of whom had seen this at least once before, weren’t as engrossed in watching as the new students were, finding it a perfect time to turn to their neighbors and chat in hushed whispers. But for the younger class, this was their first exposure to the story that set the background for why this school existed and where it had come from—and to Owain, seeing faces he recognized from family pictures and hearing a name he’d only ever heard in sad stories and prayer, this was an eye-opening experience. He knew this was his family’s school, he knew that it had been started by his aunt that he’d never met, but to see it emblazoned on a wall for everyone to watch…

He figured he’d have to take this education thing a bit more seriously after all.

After the video was over and the lights came back on, the entirety of the staff of the school made their way to standing in a line that cut across the auditorium floor. There was one exception, that being the principal standing at a podium a few steps in front of the line. “Welcome to another wonderful year of school,” Chrom’s voice echoed through the room, some of the students applauding his introduction and cutting him off until he raised a hand to silence them. “Yes, yes, I know that you are all very excited to be here this year. As we do every year, we’re going to start off with introducing ourselves to you, for those who haven’t met all of us, or maybe for those of us who are just as new as some of you.” The applause picked up again, and Owain turned in his seat to see where it was coming from. He didn’t want to be stuck at this thing forever, but when he saw that it seemed to be a group of upperclassmen, led by Lucina, doing the applauding, he decided he couldn’t complain too much about it. It was only fair that she cheered when her father was doing something.

Besides, if he was going to judge her for that, then he would have to be planning on not doing any kind of cheering when the introductions started. He didn’t necessarily intend on making much noise at all for anyone when they said their name and what they did for the school, but as more and more teachers that he knew because of having grown up being dragged to so many school events introduced themselves, he could feel the desire to chime in with the soft clapping the audience was doing. It started once a few parents of kids he’d grown up with were doing their introductions, him bringing himself to clap for them as well as he could. With the feeling in his fingers already starting to go away after the few he did clap for, he knew he’d have to find something else to do, if he was going to do anything at all, for anyone after them.

By the time it was Brady’s dad doing his introduction, he’d taken to stomping his feet down on the floor in front of him, making a loud, booming echo that went perfectly alongside the applause from everyone else. “Hey, what’re you doin’ that for, Owain?” Brady asked him, startled out of clapping for his own father at the sound. “Can’t you do this stuff like a normal person, please?”

“I would if I could,” he replied, waving his completely-numb hand in his friend’s face to remind him of his physical limitation. “I just don’t want to clap so hard I hurt myself while I can’t feel it, you know?”

“Yeah, I know, but seriously? You’re drawin’ attention to us and I don’t want everyone just _knowin’_ that that’s my dad. I’m gonna try to get around that for as long as I can.” Hearing Brady say that made Owain drop his hand and sink into his seat a bit, realizing that not everyone was automatically put into the box that he was. Just because someone was the child of a teacher didn’t mean everyone already knew it, but everyone did already know who his parents were. Brady wasn’t in that same situation, and if he didn’t want to be, it wasn’t Owain’s place to make a decision on it.

Still sinking into his seat, he sheepishly apologized, “Sorry, bud, I just kind of forgot that not everyone knows like they know about me and—“ He stopped himself when he looked to the line of teachers for a split second and saw his mother’s eyes looking in his direction, her arm raised to wave at him when she found him. As quickly as he could he looked away, but the damage was done, as even without a microphone on her she could be heard squealing about something up front. “—dang it, there’s my mom, being weird like always.”

“I bet you’d love to get away from her,” Inigo commented, leaning back in his own seat and smirking at Owain as he spoke. “What a shame that parents are forever, and none are quite as cool as mine. I’m so glad no one in my family ever intended on working in a school like this, I’d hate to have that kind of attention on me all the time simply because of who I was related to.”

Owain had wanted to make some snappy response about how he already hated the attention, but then he heard the voice filling the room with an introduction and he found himself loudly cheering instead, while everyone else seemed to respond with trepidation. If he was trying not to draw attention to himself, cheering for one of the most unpopular teachers in the school was doing the exact opposite. However, for the very next person, the cheers and applause started before they even spoke, and Owain was right there along with them, playing off what he’d already done as if he was just getting ready for what was to come.

At the end of the line, after Chrom had taken the microphone again and was addressing everyone once more, Owain covered his face and sighed, thinking about what had just happened. This was definitely the place he was going to be stuck for the next four years, he understood, but now he knew how his fellow students felt about every adult figure in his life that worked at the school. With the list of school rules to be abided by as the background noise to his thoughts, he made a couple mental notes to keep in mind no matter what, first and foremost being that whatever he did, he was going to be making changes to how people perceived his family. Secondly, if he was seen as a misbehaving troublemaker, it would reflect badly on his adored mother, not his disliked father. And thirdly, he needed to constantly play off his connection to the man running the school, because people loved Chrom most of all and he needed to not let that affect anything, positive or negative.

When the assembly let out, they’d been at the school for just over an hour, the day barely having started at all. There was still plenty of time for those rules to be put into effect.

* * *

All students had been assigned their lockers and been given a rough approximation of what their classes were going to be before the school year had started, but after the assembly they were expected to wait in line for a finalized schedule so they knew where to head for the day. “I really hope we don’t have too many classes not together,” Owain said as he and Brady got in line, his friend huddling rather close to him due to all the other students swarming the same tables they were trying to get to. “I can’t be that stupid to be in no classes with you, can I? I mean, I passed all my classes before this…”

“I’d hate it if I didn’t have any classes with ya, Owain.” Shuffling closer to him, Brady glanced around at all the other students, none of which he knew. “I’m not very good at makin’ friends, and since you’re really the only one I’ve got…”

“Oh, would you listen to that, you’re already forgetting that any friend of Owain’s is a friend of mine, naturally.” Coming up behind them with his schedule already in hand, Inigo waved the paper at them both, before fanning what turned out to be a stack out for them to see. “Let’s get out of this line and look at these together, shall we?”

Stunned, Owain looked up at Brady, who was looking back down at him, before they both turned to look at Inigo with surprise. Brady stammered, “H-how’d you get your hands on our schedules?” at the exact moment that Owain loudly took offense to the other part of the statement, asking, “Why would you think you’re friends with all my friends, when you don’t ever get along nicely with any of them?”

“Gentlemen, too many questions to be answered at once here,” he replied, holding up his hands and nearly dropping the schedules in the process. “Just follow me and we’ll sort all this out as we get to it.” There was no reason for them to argue with Inigo here, as he had done something nice for them, so they followed him away from where the crowds were and down one of the halls towards their lockers, a walk during which he handed them their schedules. “Now, to explain, I managed to convince the person in charge of handing these out to trust me with yours, because he knew me to be close with one or both of you.”

Without hesitation, and before he distracted himself with looking at what classes he was going to have, Owain sighed and slammed his head into his schedule as he held it in front of his face. “I can’t believe my dad would do that, give you something for me and Brady. Doesn’t he know that you’ll make fun of me for what classes I have?”

“Can’t make fun of you for what I also have,” Inigo said with a sincere voice, sounding almost ashamed to admit to what he just had. “And I think your father knew that, which is why it makes sense that he gave me your schedule. As for Brady here…well, I’m sure he assumed that if you had no reason to go up to him, Brady wouldn’t go either.”

If it wasn’t for Brady agreeing with that statement, Owain would have started complaining about the whole situation, but once the words of agreement left his friend’s mouth, he knew he had no reason to complain. “Huh, well I guess my dad did something helpful for once,” he remarked, pulling his face off the schedule so he could read it over. The names of the classes were daunting, as he didn’t consider himself good at _anything_ except telling stories, and none of the classes looked like they’d want him doing that. Coupling that fear with the names of the teachers, he was certain this semester was going to try to kill him based solely on who was teaching what. “Well, good news is that I don’t have to have his class, not yet anyway, but bad news is that—“

“Uh, you’re not in your dad’s class?” Brady asked as an interruption, sounding scared as he spoke. “Because if you’re not in it, then who’s gonna keep him from pickin’ on me?” The other two exchanged a look, before they all decided to hold their schedules out and compare them against each other, to make sense of what Brady was asking. When they saw that, somehow, Inigo and Owain’s schedules were identical but had zero classes that overlapped with Brady’s, it explained the question and gave them no possible answer to it. “Ya mean that I don’t get to spend any class time with either of you?”

“It doesn’t look like it, dude,” Owain replied, taking his own schedule back to look at it further. “But don’t worry, you’ve probably got Laurent as a class buddy, and he’s pretty cool if you can get along with him. Since I can’t get along with him, I’m glad I won’t have to have him in my classes, but you don’t really know him, so maybe you’ll get along fine!”

“That’s real assuring, thanks Owain.” Brady sounded like he was on the verge of tears, something made more obvious when he spoke again. “I just wanted to have a good time at school with my best friend, and I can’t even get that! Why’d this have to happen?”

Owain didn’t have a response, but Inigo did, which he gave even as his attention was being drawn elsewhere. “It’s because you, unlike us, have a brain that you can actually rely on to get you places. Now man up, looks like we have ladies approaching.” He gestured down the hall to where a gaggle of girls were heading their way, some of which looked like upperclassmen and others looking like they were freshmen just like them. As they came closer, he corrected his statement, clearing his throat to say, “Some ladies and a witch, it looks like. Let’s ignore the witch and focus on the ladies.”

Much to Inigo’s dismay, it wasn’t any of the “ladies” that stopped to talk to them as the group passed them by, but rather the one person he had hoped would ignore their existence as she walked. “Would you look at who it is, it’s the ‘how’d you manage to get into this school’ group!” Her blonde pigtails swaying as she tilted her head from side to side as she mocked them, the girl looked between Inigo and Owain, both of whom did not look thrilled to be in her presence, before her eyes settled on Brady, who was still almost crying. “And _hello_ there, tall, dark, and emotional. Who are you, and why are you hanging around these dorks?”

“Er, my name’s Brady, but don’t we—“ He was cut off in his answer by her grabbing him and trying to pull him from in between his friends towards her. “—hey! What’re ya doing that for? I’m here for a reason!”

“I’m changing whatever it is you’re doing, you can do so much better than glue-eater and ass-kisser here.” She attempted to pull him away again, but thanks to his shock at hearing how she’d referred to his friends, he made it a lot easier for her to drag him along. “Now come with me, if you’re really who you say you are you’re going to _love_ getting to know the cool kids rather than these losers.”

“I…think we just lost Brady,” Owain said as he watched his friend get dragged down the hall, the girl holding on to him trying to catch them up to the group of girls she’d initially been part of. “I mean, if it wasn’t Severa holding him hostage I might be more interested in chasing him down, but why would I chase down a bully like her?”

Tapping a finger to his lips in thought, Inigo shrugged. “I don’t think we should, let’s just consider him a dearly departed friend who will never be the same after he gets involved with all those ladies.” The last thought was spoken with a sigh, Inigo more focused on the fact that Severa had been part of the group of ladies than the fact that she had just physically taken someone from them. “Besides, it’s not like we’re going to see either of them for the rest of the day, barring lunch, maybe.”

“That’s true, I guess. I hope Brady has fun today, being stuck with girls like her.” Owain looked at his schedule one more time, just to make sure he knew where he was supposed to be going first, then turned to Inigo with a halfhearted smile. “Let’s just go to class, see what’s in store for us this semester.”

The look of disgust on both boys’ faces when they got to their first class and, after reading the seating chart on the wall, seeing Severa’s name as one of their classmates was one that they were sure they were going to share over and over again that day. “So much for not seeing her for the rest of the day,” Inigo grumbled, resenting the fact that her name was in the spot right in between his and Owain’s. “First she’s the one to stop out of all of those lovely ladies, then she’s in our class. What next, she’s going to be in all of our classes?”

“Don’t say that, it’ll come true that way,” Owain told him, before remembering that all the schedules were already made and it was likely that it was already the case. “Besides, who else in that group did we both know? Lucina? Because she wasn’t going to stop, she’s showing all the girls she’s friends with around because she’s a super-cool person like that.”

“Your cousin’s friends with Severa? Really? I would have figured she would have better taste in the people she considers her friends.” Looking around and seeing that no one else had come to class yet, and that it was just the two of them in the room, Inigo’s attention went back to the seating chart. “Do you think we could get away with switching her seat with one of ours, so we could be closer together?”  
Owain shook his head, already going to his chair to make sure he was in place before class started, so that he wouldn’t possibly get in trouble on the first day. “No way, all the teachers know my parents and so they know all my friends, which means we can’t get away with something like that. I bet they’d do it to Lucina too, if she had classes with any of her best friends and wasn’t sitting next to them already.”

“I suppose you’re right on that, don’t want to press our luck on the matter.” Inigo took his seat as well, laying his arms on the desk and slumping over it. “This is not going to be fun, though, you over there, me over here, and that witch in between us.”

“Go on ahead and say it, call me what you really want to,” Severa said, startling Inigo as he hadn’t realized she had come into the room and was standing where he just had been, looking at the chart for herself. “I’m super aware I’m a bitch, you can tell me that.”

“Cursing isn’t something I was raised to do,” he replied, hanging his head as he tried catching his breath from the scare. “Besides, I think witch is more appropriate, because you clearly can cast spells on people. How else did you manage to get Brady away from us?”

Batting her eyelashes, Severa leaned down next to Inigo and got incredibly close to his face before answering. “Well you see, I knew who he was the entire time, I just played stupid to get under his skin, dragged him away, and then took him to his class, because you weren’t ever going to do that for him.” She backed away when Inigo blew into her face, shaking and coughing overdramatically to try making him feel bad.

“I thought that was weird of you to ask him his name,” Owain added, trying to feel like he was part of their disagreement. “We’ve all known each other since we were little kids, you weren’t going to forget who Brady is just because he got way taller than the rest of us.”

“Way to explain something that didn’t need explaining, Owain.” As she stopped trying to get herself a pity party that wasn’t ever going to come, Severa went to her seat and, after nearly knocking her chair into Owain’s simply because she didn’t like how it was centered in the row, she sat down and started adjusting her pigtails. “But anyway, I know I wasn’t going to forget him. I just didn’t know that he’d gotten a million times less little kid-like.”

“He’s still the same Brady I’ve always known.” Not even slightly bothered by how Severa glared at him when he spoke, Owain continued talking even as the classroom around them started to fill up. “He’s just taller and I guess a little better looking, which I don’t think is much of a big deal at all.”

“Much of a big deal? Clearly you have no taste then.” Her focus going right back to her hair, Severa didn’t say another word to either of the boys until after class, when she got up before they did and told them, in the most sickeningly sweet voice she could manage, “See you in a few minutes, I’m going to go find your little friend again and make sure he’s doing okay.”

The boys looked at each other and laughed, collecting their stuff and heading out for their next class. “I doubt she’s going to find Brady, she’s just trying to make us feel bad about not having classes with him, I think,” Inigo said, trying to make sense of Severa’s behavior. “I would never expect a bully like her to be nice to the friend of the people she bullies!”

“Like I said, she’s known Brady for almost as long as I have, we all grew up together. It’s not like they didn’t know each other before all this.” There was a desire within Owain to go find wherever that girl might have gone off to, but he didn’t want to associate himself with her more than he had to. And since they definitely shared at least one class a day, it was best to limit the association to that right there. As they walked through the halls, students standing around and talking to their friends or to teachers who were supervising, he felt himself wondering what it would be like to not be scared to be around in the wrong place at the wrong time, simply because if someone overheard him saying something they’d go straight to one of his parents.

This train of thought led him to nearly walk past the classroom they were heading to, but Inigo managed to pull him out of the hall and to the door before he could get too far. “Don’t need you daydreaming right now,” he was told, Inigo motioning towards the teacher at the front of the room with one shoulder. “I would hate for you to get caught in a dream by your aunt of all people.”

“I…didn’t realize we had a class with Aunt Robin.” Owain looked to the teacher himself, seeing that it was indeed his aunt, and he sighed. “She’s so going to separate us, because she knows we’re both going to distract each other.”

He was right, but there was a positive spin to the ordeal: even though they were put in opposite corners of the classroom, Severa (when she came in right at the bell to start class) got put directly in the middle, Robin smiling at her when she explained that she wanted to keep the biggest troublemakers right where she could see them. Owain was almost certain he saw her wink at him when she said that, which made him shuffle in his seat. He wasn’t a troublemaker, he just had a hard time keeping up with classroom activities and tended to get lost in his thoughts—something that he was certain his aunt wouldn’t punish him for, because she knew as well as anyone that he wasn’t able to help it.

At least on the first day, he managed to keep himself from being called out for not paying attention, although several other students weren’t as lucky. When class was over, he was ready to escape and head on to the next one, jumping from his seat the moment the bell rang, but he was told to sit back down even though the students around him were leaving. “You seemed like you were trying to focus today, is that going to be a thing this year?” Robin asked him as she approached his desk, after making sure that the room was clear aside from the two of them (and Inigo, as he was standing by the door complaining that Owain was holding him up). “I’d love to be able to tell your mother that you’re the best student in my class, wouldn’t you like that too?”

“I would, yeah, but I know it won’t happen.” Owain couldn’t even look at his aunt when he spoke to her, not wanting to start any sort of argument when there were other classes to get to. “I’ll just end up doing just okay enough to pass, but that’s all I can ever do.”

“You know, you’re only in this section of the class because the upper one wouldn’t fit in your schedule,” she said, her voice sounding gentle as she stepped away from his desk, picking up a book off the shelf that ran along the side of the room. “It’s crazy, really. After your placement test, when we were grading them all, your test was half-finished and quite humorous, but every answer you did put was correct in some way or another. We were all impressed, and I made it my goal to make sure you succeed just like that in the class.”

Owain’s face lit up for a second, before he remembered that he had more-or-less failed his placements tests, and he sighed. “But Aunt Robin, I didn’t pass any of the tests. At all. How could I have done so well and still failed?”

“Well, a half-finished test isn’t ever going to pass anything, but what you did on it was show your potential. As I said, I would love to be able to walk to your mother’s office and tell her that you’re my star student this year.” She turned back to him, holding the book she’d picked up out so he could see its cover. It was a book she’d always had at home, something that had sat around in the dining room for years, and he was confused as to why she was showing him it, especially as it wasn’t anything academic at all. “We’re going to follow these rules to try and get you to focus in class. I work on these things with Morgan all the time, and now it’s your turn to get to try it.”

“That sounds…fun.” It really didn’t, but Owain didn’t want to crush his aunt’s dream of making him a good student in just one subject when he wasn’t ever going to be good at anything. “Uh, can I go now? I don’t want to be late to my next class.”

“You certainly can, I would never want to make you late on the first day.” She set the book back where she’d picked it up and followed him to the door, standing in the doorway after he and Inigo had run off, shaking her head at what had just happened. “That poor boy, he really needs to realize how smart he could be if he tried.”

Despite her intention for them to not be late, they were barely inside the door of their next class when the bell rang, and didn’t have time to catch their breath before they were being told to sit down in the only empty chairs remaining, which just happened to be at the same table Severa was sitting at. “So we meet again,” she said with a smirk, looking between them as they sat down, disgusted at where they had to be. “I love this school year so far. Getting to be near my _favorite_ people every class, it’s amazing!”

“Shut up, Severa,” they told her in unison, something that would have been moved past quickly had she not raised her hand and told the teacher that they were being rude to her when she’d done nothing wrong. That led to their table being hovered over for almost the entirety of the class period, just to make sure there wasn’t any more “rude behavior” happening. It was as close to being in trouble at school as Owain ever hoped to be in, ever, even though he knew he hadn’t done anything wrong there.

Come the end of the following lunch period, and he was already in a worse place. It started after a fun time of exploring the building as Brady told his friends about what he’d done in his three classes he’d already attended, while they both complained about what had happened in theirs. “So let me get this straight, you have the same three classes we do, just in a different order?” Inigo asked, to which Brady nodded. “And they couldn’t have just stuck Severa in those with you rather than in ours with us?”

“No way, all the teachers are stressing that these classes are way harder than what yours are, and I don’t think she’s smart enough to get by in ‘em. Just like, uh, you guys, I guess?” Brady scratched at the back of his head. “But it’ll be okay, I bet she’ll back off of ya when she starts getting scared about how she’s doin’ in class.”

“She hasn’t backed off of me since we started school,” Owain admitted, hanging his head in shame. “She’s always picked on me, ever since we met. Or at least that’s what my parents say, I was a baby when I met her so I don’t really know if that’s true.”

“What is true,” added Inigo as they rounded a corner and were heading back towards the cafeteria area of the building, “is that she’s really bullied us both for the past few years and she shows no intention of stopping anytime soon.”

Brady opened his mouth to say something, but the sound of someone calling his name stopped him. The same call had the effect of making the other two boys step closer to him, both of them recognizing the voice doing the calling. “Oh _gawds_ , you’re still hanging around them, aren’t you?” Severa’s voice sounded just as fake as the personality she was putting on as she tried talking to Brady, him looking down at her rather confused at what she was getting at. “Come on, come on! We have much cooler people to talk to, and you know it! Tell your little dork friends goodbye, because we’re out of here!”

“Can’t you find someone else to bother? We don’t like you, and Brady doesn’t either, and even though he won’t say it I don’t think he wants you taking him away like this!” Owain hadn’t bothered to see that Brady didn’t look too upset to be in the situation he was currently in, but he was too busy protecting his best friend to care if his friend really needed it. “Go find someone else who likes you to do this to, because none of us want it.”

“I think Brady would say otherwise, but you’re never going to let him speak for himself are you?” Almost as if she was taunting him, she reached to grab Brady’s arm again—and found herself getting pushed away by Inigo, who might not have been as close to the issue as Owain was but he wasn’t afraid to step in where it was needed. “H-hey! No pushing! That’s unfair, that’s bullying me! I’m going to get you in trouble for that, Inigo!”

“You touched him first, I have a perfect reason for my actions and no one will believe that you didn’t deserve it.” Smiling smugly at her, Inigo watched as her expression turned devious, as if she was coming up with some way to make him eat those words. “Whoa now, let’s not try to get me in trouble, it’s the first day.”

His mind going back to a conversation they’d had earlier, Owain laughed to himself before quietly reminding Inigo, “Why does that matter? She’s a bitch, after all.” Something about him using that word to refer to her, something he definitely would never do in the presence of his parents or anyone who would punish him for it, made him laugh more.

Severa, hearing how he’d just talked about her, gasped loudly and dramatically. “You’re not allowed to call me that! You’re going to be in so much trouble when I’m done talking to the principal about this!” She grinned at her announcement of what she was about to do, because the look of horror that appeared on Owain’s face about it immediately, as well as the one that came around much slower on Inigo’s face, was all she’d been looking for. “Now have fun expecting punishment for being rude to me, bye you guys!” She turned and started skipping away, but stopped herself to turn back around and wave at one of them in particular. “And I’ll talk to you later, Brady. I promise.”

“I doubt she’s going to actually tell on you guys,” Brady said as they all watched her leave their sighs. “She’s just tryin’ to get me to branch out and speak to other people, and she loves when ya fight with her. That’s what she told me, and I think we can trust her.”

Since there was no reason to believe otherwise, the boys left lunch and headed for their next class with that positive note in mind. Severa didn’t seem to be in there (actually, it seemed to be a boys-only class), and that meant that they wouldn’t have to worry about her being there for all of their classes in the day. But just because she wasn’t in the class didn’t mean she wasn’t going to have the chance to ruin things for them, as halfway through the period someone came to the classroom door, and just his presence had the teacher acting on edge. “I’m here to take a couple students with me for a few minutes,” Chrom sternly said as he stood at the door, everyone looking at him to wonder who his targets were. The teacher tried getting everyone’s attention back to the introductions for the day, but there was no chance of that working until the principal was gone.

Sinking into his seat and trying to cover his face so maybe his uncle wouldn’t see that he was there, Owain thought he was in the clear when he didn’t hear anyone’s name being called out. He figured maybe the chosen students had been silently picked and were already on their way out of the room. There was no way that Severa had made good on her threat and had gotten them in trouble on the first day of school, was there?

Based on how, moments later, he and Inigo were both being walked down to the office with a head-shaking principal in front of them, there was a way. “I know that I have to take what that girl says with a grain of salt, but if there’s even a small bit of her report that’s true I’m going to have to speak with some parents over this,” Chrom could be heard saying in front of them. “But I’m going to be careful on this one. There is no way you two did what she came to me about. She might have been crying, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“What did she say we did?” Inigo asked, looking over to Owain to see the almost horrified look on his face at the fact that they were being marched out of class. “Whatever it is, I’m sure she’s lying just to make us look bad.”

He was hushed by Chrom, who shook his head instead of answering the question. “We will have to discuss it privately in my office. If it’s untrue, I don’t want you both arguing with me about it.”

“Ri-ight, got it.” Giving a little nod, Inigo held his hand out to give Owain a fist-bump, something that was ignored by the blond as he was still in shock that this was really happening. “Come on, Owain, we know she lied without being told what about. There’s no reason to worry.”

“I’m not _in class_ right now, my parents are going to find out and they’re going to be unhappy with me for the rest of ever.” The words fell from Owain’s mouth like they were cascading over a waterfall, his thoughts jumbled up and making it impossible for him to speak correctly. Inigo shrugged it off, not seeing the big deal that Owain was, and because he was the one more vocal about everything he was the one who had to go into Chrom’s office first, leaving Owain stuck outside drowning in his worries about what was happening.

Time seemed to go by slowly, thanks to how panicked he was. Every time he looked at the clock, he could have sworn it had been a lot longer than a minute or two, but the clock never lied to him about the actual time. He didn’t want to be there, he didn’t want to be in class either but at least being in class would be better than being stuck outside the principal’s office by himself, with the constant fear that someone would see him there.

The door to the office came back open before anyone happened to walk by, and Inigo seemed awfully calm when he came outside. “She accused me of touching her inappropriately,” he whispered to Owain as he passed him by to head back to class. “Which I didn’t do, the cameras your uncle pulled up proved it. We’re in the clear here, my friend.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Chrom said as he followed Inigo out and beckoned for Owain to follow him into the office. “Her accusation here isn’t as cut-and-dry as hers towards him, it’s not like I can pull up camera footage to prove or disprove it.”

Swallowing down hard, Owain felt like he knew what was coming, but he wasn’t going to argue with his uncle when he hadn’t heard the exact accusation. Once they were in the office and the door was shut behind him, that was when he had the chance to say his piece, an opportunity he took. “You know she’s always bullied me, right Uncle Chrom?”

“I do indeed know that, but it doesn’t change the fact that, if she is to be believed, you called her something rude unprovoked.” Chrom didn’t sound too angry as he brought that up, but Owain was sure that was because he was acting not like an uncle but instead like an unbiased principal. “Which if you did that, I would either have to give you a detention on your first day of high school, or I would have to confer with your parents on what to do.”

“What did she say I said? Because she said some rude things to us today too.”

“We’re not making this a game of ‘he said, she said’, Owain. We’re getting down to what she came here in tears about, and that’s you calling her an unflattering and rude name.” That was when Chrom looked at his nephew and narrowed his eyes, expecting a straight answer from the boy on if he had or not. Owain kept his lips sealed, not wanting to say anything at all. “Did you do it or not?”

His jaw started trembling as he thought about what kinds of trouble either punishment option would result in. “I only did it because she told Inigo not to call her a witch, and since she was there I just…please don’t punish me for this, Uncle Chrom! She asked for it!”

“It doesn’t matter if she asked for it or not, it’s not proper to use language like that in a school. And you should know better than to speak to anyone that way, you were raised to treat others with respect, weren’t you?” He nodded, because he had been, and that was when Chrom sighed, relaxing his stare a bit. “They might say I’m going easy on you about this, but I’ve heard from others today about her behavior and I don’t want to punish anyone simply because a girl with an attitude problem decided to misbehave. Word of this will not leave this office, and definitely will not reach your parents, but if you so much as put one toe out of line again after this, there will be consequences. Do you understand me?”

Owain couldn’t bring himself to answer, merely nodding until he was allowed to leave the office and head back to class for himself. He wasn’t going to talk about this with anyone, because he didn’t want to think about how he very nearly got in serious trouble on the first day of school. He was going to steer clear of that kind of behavior for the rest of the day and the year, and he was going to hold himself to that decision.

If that meant going to class early and not even talking to his friends, then that was how it was going to have to be. And for the rest of the classes that day, he managed to keep himself out of trouble and away from talking to anyone who might drag him down (even though Severa kept trying to instigate things with him whenever she got the chance). But the moment the dismissal bell for the day rang through the building, trouble was brewing and it was only partially Severa’s fault for it.

Partially, in that she was the major reason the group of girls had to come down to where the freshman lockers were to begin with. She wasn’t the only one to blame for this happening though, and while two of the three boys knew this, the third was completely unaware. He was unaware, and he was fixated on the lovely ladies he hadn’t met before coming his way—nothing but a recipe for disaster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the nearly 2 month delay on this--I hit a writing rut and had to slowly pull myself out of it.
> 
> Anyway, keep in mind some of the past events that these kids (well, Owain/Brady/Severa) have had involving each other when you're reading this! Inigo didn't know them back in the days of Terribelle Things and Young and Yearning so he doesn't have that history with all of them, heck he didn't even know Brady until the beginning of this story! Yes there will be more scenes to focus on other kids, right now we're just trying to set the story up and get people introduced. Starting with the end of the next chapter if there's anyone you want a scene to focus on you can definitely ask for it, but for the next chapter it's still just going to be intro stuff!
> 
> If there's anyone you're dying to see in this fic right away, let me know and I'll see if I can work their introduction in with the next chapter c:


	3. Crushing

The footsteps of the group came to a stop once they’d gotten right to where the lockers of the three boys were clustered. “What a surprise to see you three around here,” Severa greeted them with, smirking as she spoke. “It’s almost as if you knew we were headed this way and wanted to watch for us, isn’t it?”

“I’m pretty sure we’re here because our lockers are here, but seriously, buzz off, Severa. You’ve already gotten me in trouble once today and I don’t want you doing it again,” Owain grumbled, stepping closer to his locker to try and get her to keep on moving on. His mention of trouble raised eyebrows, a couple of the girls in the group leaning in closer to Severa to ask her what had happened, while Lucina in the back looked down at her cousin with an unamused look on her face. “Yeah, Lucy, she got me in trouble on the first day, your dad already knows about it and I’m sure my parents already do too.”

Shrugging one shoulder, Lucina showed that she didn’t really care about her cousin’s behavioral habits. “It happens, Owain, and I don’t judge you for it. Just make sure you don’t screw things up too much to make me start looking bad, got it?”

“Ooh, Lucina looking bad?” her best friend, attached to her at the hip, asked, looking directly at Owain as she did, before turning to Lucina with a devious grin that gave a warning to what she was about to do. Without so much as a word or a reason, she started cackling in laughter, bringing the back of her hand to her mouth to try and muffle it. “That’s impossible, and anyone who does that to my sweet Lucina will be punished for it, no matter what!”

“Calm down there, Noire, it’s just my cousin we’re talking to here, he’s not going to actually try to make me look bad when he wants to look good for himself. Isn’t that right, Owain?” When he nodded, Lucina nudged her friend with her elbow to get her to stop laughing. “See, he doesn’t mean any harm, so don’t harm him for being a weirdo sometimes.”

“You know what you should do, Lucina?” Since it was Severa talking, the people who had been asking her what was going on having left to leave the three boys and now four girls standing there in the hall, it was anyone’s guess as to what she was going to suggest. “I think you should take these boys under your wing just like you’ve taken me, maybe that’ll make them better people in the end.”

Thinking about how to reply for a second, Lucina ultimately shot the idea down. “No way, Owain’s got to branch out and live his own life, I can’t be there calling his shots all the time. And you know how I feel about his friends, we all discussed this earlier.”

Severa rolled her eyes at the denial, but the only remaining girl who hadn’t spoken yet had something to say on the matter, that she let ramble from her mouth the moment she was allowed to. “Oh gods, I can’t imagine having these three boys hanging around us all the time! I can totally excuse if we let Brady do it, but—“

“Hey, wait a second, why’s she know who Brady is?” Inigo interjected, catching the brown-haired girl off-guard by how he was suddenly pointing at her while looking at Brady, who was now leaning against the lockers just like Owain was. “Better yet, why do none of the gorgeous girls in this school know who I am? You all know my brother, why don’t you know me as well!”

The girl blinked a few times, studying Inigo’s face carefully as he took deep breaths in and out trying to contain himself from saying anything further, his cheeks having gone red from the embarrassment of having gotten so confrontational. “I’m sorry, but who’s your brother? I don’t think I know him at all…”

“Forget I said it, then,” he said, still trying to calm down. “It’s not like he’s really my brother, anyway. He’s just like one to me.”

“Well see, if you want to know why I know who Brady is, it’s that same kind of thing.” She waved at Brady, who gave a small wave back, much to Inigo’s surprise. “He’s my little brother, believe it or not, and when his mom said she was putting him in school she asked me if I’d keep an eye on him the first few days to make sure he was getting along nicely with people. Which he totally is, if he’s got a new friend that isn’t Owain!”

Inigo was left standing there dumbstruck as the girls started moving on, and even though they were there for a few more minutes he didn’t hear a word of what had been said by any of them past that girl’s announcement that she was Brady’s sister. “How did I not know your older sister was one of the cutest girls in all of existence?” he asked Brady once the group of girls was out of earshot. “I could feel myself melting where I stood while talking to her, how could you neglect to tell me about her?”

“I don’t really talk much about Cynthia unless I’m asked about her,” he replied, scuffing his foot on the floor as he did. “The whole sibling thing’s kind of complicated, if ya don’t know about it. Kinda like what it sounds like with you and your brother, now that I think about it. What’s up with that?”

“Nothing! We aren’t even here to talk about me or him, I want to know all about that sister of yours. Cynthia, you said her name was? What grade is she? How old? Is she nice or rude? Why does she hang around filth like Severa, or better yet, why do she and Owain’s cousin allow that witch to be with them?” When he was met with silence he physically grabbed Brady’s shoulders and started shaking them. “Answers, please! I have so many questions!”

While this was happening, Owain had gotten into his own locker and grabbed his things out of it, ready to put an end to the whole day. It wasn’t until he’d slammed the door closed that he realized he had two paths he could take, and neither of them sounded fun: he could either go find his cousin and have her drive him home, or he could find either of his parents and wait for them to leave. “Hey guys, why don’t you put this to rest and pick up tomorrow? I bet your parents are ready to get you,” he told them, his words separating the two and driving them to get a move on without him needing to do the same. It was while they were both absorbed in getting their things from their lockers that he slipped away, having mentally made a decision on which path he was going to take.

His mother’s office was somewhere he’d been going since long before he’d been a student at the school, and he wasn’t exactly a fan of going in there after having spent so many hours trapped inside of it while she was finishing up odd jobs. He especially didn’t want to be going in there after the first day of school, when she was undoubtedly going to ask him a million and one questions about how his day had gone, about how he’d handled his first day being surrounded by family in a school where everyone knew who he was related to, about how his classes were going to go and so on. But at the same time, he was sure Lucina was going to go out with her friends and she wouldn’t want someone who wasn’t invited to hang out with them forcing them to go by the house before they could actually go out.

The door to the office was decorated with all sorts of drawings that his mother must’ve fished out of old folders and collections, because they were different than anything he’d ever seen on it before. There was still the “please knock” sign up in the window, obscuring the one part that could normally be seen through, and he raised his hand to knock to gain entry to the room, but stopped himself when he heard voices mid-conversation on the other side. They were voices he recognized as being his parents’, and if he was dreading going in because of his mother’s questioning, having to face his father at the same time was just as bad, if not worse.

He hadn’t decided if he was going to go through with knocking or not before someone made the choice for him, coming up beside him and knocking above his head. He leaned his head back enough to see that his uncle, standing stern-faced, was the one trying to get their attention, and when he heard the door crack open he quickly looked to see his mother’s beaming face staring out at the two of them. “Oh goodness, what do the both of you want?” Lissa asked, pulling the door open further in case either of them were planning on entering. “Were we keeping you waiting for long?”

“I was just swinging by to remind you to stop by the store on your way home tonight, since I’m sure you’ll be out of here before I will,” Chrom replied, retracting his arm now that the door was open, before pushing Owain forward a few unwilling steps. “However, I’m not sure what he’s here for, or how long he’s been here.”

“I, er, came by because I didn’t want to bother Lucina with taking me home right now.” Tugging at the collar of his shirt, feeling his face warming up at having to explain to his mother that he was coming to burden her with his presence, Owain tried turning away to get far away from the office, but Chrom pushed him another step forward, nearly into the doorway and into the reach of his mother. “I’ll go away if you don’t want me here, I promise you I will!”

“Now there’s no need for that, you’re always welcome in here,” she told him, as she looked past him to Chrom, who was waiting on some kind of response to his reminder. “And yeah, I know, you’ve only told me like five times today that I have to pick up dinner for tonight. I won’t forget about it, now go get back to whatever work’s going to keep you here late! I’ve got so many things to ask my baby about his first day!”

There were the words Owain had been dreading to hear, and when his mother tugged him inside the small office and shut the door behind him, leaving Chrom standing outside to go do whatever he still had to do, he knew he wasn’t getting out anytime soon. As he was dropping his belongings against the wall so he wasn’t stuck holding them, he heard a very excited and masculine voice say, “So there he is, the big high school student, makin’ waves on his first day already!” Holding a hand out for a high-five, Owain’s father slowly let it drop when he saw that his son wasn’t interested in going through with the motion. “Okay, that’s fine, we don’t haveta do that kinda stuff if ya don’t wanna anymore, Owain. No big deal.”

“It’s not that, Dad, don’t think I don’t want to, I just…” He was worried he was about to start disappointing his parents if he said exactly what was on his mind, about how he’d managed to get in trouble on the very first day of school. “I didn’t exactly have the best day today, because of a whole lot of things, and I’m not convinced anything’s ever going to get better for me. Can’t I just go to a normal school and not be a disappointment to the family?”

His parents exchanged a look between them that was short-lived, as his father turned to say something to him—but before he could say anything, Lissa grabbed his arm and caught his attention once more, shaking her head at him. “Not right now, Vaike, you can’t be the one to talk him out of this. I mean, you could, but I think he’d listen to it more if it was me telling him it, if that makes sense.”  
“C’mon, Lissa, why can’t ya let me be the one t’tell him that he’s gotta go through with being here? Why does it have to be you doin’ the job?” When she didn’t answer him with anything more than a pleading look, he shook her hand off of his arm and reached to grab Owain by both shoulders, drawing the boy in so that he could look down into his eyes. “Listen, kid, it ain’t gonna be easy bein’ here at this school. Me and your mom’ve both been in that position before. But see, you leavin’ this place and goin’ somewhere else? It wouldn’t be right, not when everyone ya know is here in this school.”

“And that’s why _I_ need to be the one telling him this!” Since her husband was already doing a pretty good job of holding Owain in place, Lissa went and wrapped her arms around her son, hugging him tightly. “I know how hard it is to be a bad student and going to a school where people expect things of you because of who your family is. I mean, when I went here, it was after Chrom had already graduated and everyone was still comparing me to him! And he was kind of a slacker himself, so for people to judge me based on him, you know that they’re just comparing because we’re all family.”

Owain was understanding what his parents were getting at, but he wasn’t quite ready to accept that they were giving him the exact advice he needed to hear. “Yeah, but, what about how I don’t focus and I’m not a good learner? What about that? There’s too many good students here for the teachers to want to help me succeed, even if you are my parents and you both work here!”

“I can guarantee that people won’t want to see you fail simply because you’re our kid,” Lissa said, squeezing him tighter. “They’ll do whatever they can to make sure that you pass your classes and have a fun time doing it! Like…ooh! You have class with your aunt, right?” He nodded, because that was the one class that he knew the teacher was actually going to care about his education and he was slightly excited for it, even if apprehensive that there was anything that could be done to help him learn. “Well, if you show her a way that you learn, I bet you everything she’ll go and show the other teachers that exact thing, so they can help you out.”

“And what if I don’t learn anything in the class? What if Aunt Robin can’t go around showing the other teachers how to teach me? What if I fail everything and get kicked out, just because I can’t learn?” Owain could feel himself choking up as he expressed these doubts, because he didn’t want to be seen as the family failure. He looked into his father’s eyes, seeing nothing but compassion looking back at him, and when he blinked a stray tear fell from the corner of his eye. “I’m not meant to be here, I’m really not.”

“At least you’ve got a family that’s here t’support ya when you’re down, and help ya grow from all your problems,” Vaike said to him, letting go of his shoulders to go ahead and join in on the group hug. “We ain’t gonna let you fail anything, no matter what.”

Squeezed between his two parents, both of whom seemed to be more focused on him and making sure that he was okay over whatever it had been they were talking about before he’d shown up, all Owain wanted to do was cry for a bit and then move past what was happening. He was always doubting his academic ability, because of how he wasn’t the greatest learner and he was far from a great student, and the reality of having to follow in the footsteps of everyone else in his family was a hard one to accept. When their hug ended, he grabbed a notebook out of his bag and hopped up onto the little bed in the corner of the office to relax and do something to get over how upset he had been, taking his mind off of school and what all had happened to allow for his parents to get back to their own lives.

He hadn’t even gotten the chance to pull out his pencil from the spiral binding of the book when they struck up their conversation once more, as if he wasn’t even there. “Okay, so how do we break it to Chrom that we don’t have the money to buy dinner tonight?” Lissa asked with a sigh, taking her own seat in her chair at her desk. “I thought we did, but it turns out we don’t, and I’ve been dreading telling him about it all day.”

“We either tell ‘im, or he gets home tonight wonderin’ where the food is and finds that we didn’t get anythin’, it’s up to ya on which option you wanna take.” Vaike shrugged, drawing the only other open chair up right next to his wife’s. “Personally I think I’d rather do without him yellin’ at us for bein’ irresponsible like that, but—“

“You’re the reason we don’t have the money!” Owain looked up from his notebook to see his mother with her hands at the sides of her face, trying to keep herself calm, and he felt himself want to hide from what was about to come. Having to listen in on his parents’ conversation was one thing, but to be present for one of their arguments about something in their control? That wasn’t anything he ever wanted to do, despite it happening from time to time. “If you hadn’t gone out and spent everything we have on yourself, we wouldn’t be having this problem!”

“H-hey now, I didn’t spend everythin’ on myself, don’t be tellin’ lies like that t’keep yourself from lookin’ guilty in all this.” Even as he spoke, Vaike was scooting his chair back away from Lissa’s, the screeching sound of the chair against the floor yet another reason why Owain was stuck witnessing the argument, because there was no way he’d focus on writing in his notebook if there was screeching happening.

“You’re right, I’m being ridiculous, I spent some of it too. You know, on myself and our son, so that we had nice things for the school year! Unlike you, who spent your allotment, and then what I didn’t spend of mine, on things we don’t need!” Lissa let out an angry scream, before throwing both her hands down onto the edge of her desk and knocking against it a few times. “I can’t believe you did that, and now I’ve gotta be the one to tell my brother that it happened, because he expected us to be able to do something right for a change, and we failed him yet again!”

Having tried to get into his writing to at least attempt to ignore what his parents were talk about, Owain considered it a failure when he felt someone looking at him, and he glanced up from the blank page to see both his parents staring at him, their attention going back to each other when they saw he wasn’t distracted after all. As they made their discussion quieter, with less yelling and more harsh whispers, he set his notebook down and fell onto his side, sighing as he did. He knew why they’d both looked at him when they had, after what had been said, and he hated knowing that, in the eyes of every adult in his house, he was nothing more than something wrong that had happened to them.

That wasn’t ever going to do him any favors in the “trying to feel less like a failure” department, and he was sure no one cared enough to want to change that idea. While he was laying down, there wasn’t anything keeping him from still listening in on his parents’ conversation, which was still on the topic of money and how they’d managed to waste it; he never was sure how they kept coming back to this problem every month, but it was the same story over and over again, complete with the yelling and the finger-pointing and the accusations of who had done what.

At least this month it was just the two of them arguing about it, for the moment. Whenever Chrom got involved was when it got ugly, to the point of grown men getting in each other’s faces yelling back and forth about where the money had been spent. Owain had been forced to hear his uncle yelling at his father about being a horrible person enough in his lifetime that he could do without it happening again, but when it was his father who decided he was going to be the one to track Chrom down and tell him what had happened, he didn’t want to make him do it alone. “Dad, I’ll go with you if you want me to,” he offered, sitting up as his father opened the office’s door. “I’m not doing much else, and if Mom’s not going to go…”

“Owain, please. You don’t need to be your father’s buddy for this. He knows what he did, so he needs to be a man and deal with it.” Lissa was running a hand through her hair, her face reddened from how upset she’d been in the conversation. “Going with him is just going to make him beat around the bush with it.”

“Don’t listen to her, I’d love t’have ya come with me if ya wanted to. It ain’t anythin’ ya wanna really be present for, I’m sure, but it’d be nice t’have the company now that it’s offered.” Vaike’s hand was lingering on the doorknob, as he was looking at Owain waiting for the boy’s answer. “Maybe you’ll be able t’keep Chrom from gettin' too worked up over this. Gods know he doesn’t need t’be doin’ that.”

But just as Owain was preparing to pick his notebook back up to get it in his bag, his mother had a point that made him rethink leaving after all. “He’s going to have to fork over money to pay for dinner when he expected us to do it, he’s going to get exactly as worked up as he needs to be.”

“He ain’t gonna mind all that much, I really don’t think it’s a money thing that’s why he wanted us t’get food, I think it’s a time one. Which that means it ain’t our problem once we’ve got the money.” He heard Lissa sigh behind him and winced at the sound, before sighing for himself and asking Owain, “Now are ya comin’ with or not?”

“I did offer to start, so yeah I’m coming with!” The decision came a lot easier than he thought it would, and even though his mother seemed to be a bit unhappy about what he’d chosen to do, his father was overjoyed that he’d been picked. After he packed his bag once more, the two left the office, leaving Lissa there sitting and shaking her head at the pair, a sight that stuck with Owain as they walked away.

“Y’know, it’s not everyday that someone chooses t’come with me over stickin’ with your mom there,” Vaike said once they were a few feet away from the office’s door and there was very little chance of Owain changing his mind and turning back. “Normally everyone’s jumpin’ t’stay by her side, leavin’ ol’ me out in the cold or whatever. But you doin’ this for me, this means a whole lot, kid.”

Giving a shaky smile at his father as he took in the powerful words, Owain had to swallow down some fearful questions before he gave any response. “You’re welcome, Dad. I know I spend a lot of time with Mom myself, but this time I really think you needed it…and I didn’t want her to ask me about how my day went.”

“What makes ya think I ain’t gonna do the same t’ya, though?” He hadn’t considered even once that going off alone with his father would result in the same questioning, and he must have looked surprised at the idea, because he heard the booming laughter come from his father, before he had an arm wrapped around his shoulder and he was pulled in closer to the man that still towered over him. “Don’t worry, if ya don’t wanna talk about your day I ain’t gonna make ya, that’s somethin’ ya do on your own time.”

“Thanks for that, a whole lot. I’m sure Uncle Chrom’s going to tell you and Mom both what happened anyway, so I’d really rather not have to be the first one to tell you.” He tacked on “even though I didn’t do anything to _get_ in trouble” in a whisper, turning his head so he was facing away from his father as he said it. That wasn’t anything he wanted to keep hidden inside of himself, but at the same time he didn’t want anyone hearing him say it.

The next thing his father said showed that he hadn’t heard a word of it. “Well anyway, now that we’re outta that office and on our way t’fixin’ a huge mistake that really shouldn’t have happened in the first place, how badly d’ya think your uncle’s gonna yell over some misspent money and a meal he’s gotta pay for now?”

“I don’t know what the money was spent on, so I don’t know what he’ll think.” That was a lie, as Owain had definitely heard his mother mention something about alcohol being bought that shouldn’t have been, and everyone in the family knew that, from time to time, Vaike tended to get really wrapped up in drinking by himself (as all his friends had long since grown out of the idea that they could be functional and still get wildly drunk every week). Owain had been around for enough arguments that involved the purchase of alcohol that he knew that his uncle didn’t approve of the “young adult-like behavior”, and he was pretty sure that the moment anything of the sort was brought up, there would be yelling.

“Oh, y’know, the money was spent on the essentials. Clothes for all ‘a us, few school supplies for ya, maybe a…” That was when Vaike took in a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, letting go of his son to bring that hand up to scratch the back of his head. “Maybe a drink or two, but it wasn’t too much outta the budget we’d set. Your mom allowed for it t’happen, by the way, so don’t let her think she’s innocent on this one.”

Awkwardly laughing to pretend like what he’d just heard wasn’t reinforcing exactly what he’d heard his mother say in the office, Owain said, “I bet she’s kind of innocent, I mean, she doesn’t do any drinking ever, does she?” The question was left unanswered, and when Owain looked to see his father’s facial reaction to it he saw a stone-cold expression of disappointment. “I-I mean, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, Dad, I just—“

“No need to apologize for that, ya said the right thing there. She really didn’t do anythin’ wrong, except let me continue t’be a drain on her money month after month.” In his mind, Owain was smacking himself over and over for opening this topic up, because now he was going to have to listen to yet another instance of his father beating himself up. If it wasn’t loud family arguments that always painted his father as the bad guy, it was moments like this where he showed his weakness and insecurity with his position in the family, and Owain wasn’t a fan of any of it. He hated knowing that his parents were perpetually in a bad place in their relationship, but most of all he hated knowing that it was his fault that was the case.

Growing up in a household where he was blamed for every bad thing that had happened hadn’t exactly done wonders on the boy’s feelings towards himself, and seeing the only other person he knew who also shouldered that blame getting down on himself was only making him feel worse. “Dad, maybe we shouldn’t go tell Uncle Chrom about this. Maybe going to Aunt Robin would be a better idea, or maybe someone else could help out? Do you think Brady’s dad is around still, I bet he’d help since you and him are friends!”

“Somethin’ tells me that goin’ to anyone else’ll just make this uglier when it eventually gets t’Chrom, no matter who it is tellin’ him. Your mom was right when she said I’ve gotta man up about this stuff, and there’s no time like the present.” It was completely obvious to Owain that his father was talking like this to psyche himself up for what he was going to have to do, and he really wished there was something he could say to help out. But the words didn’t come to him quickly, and he was left scrambling to come up with something he could do as an encouraging action. Offering his hand for a high-five, like the one he’d turned down before, was the first idea he had, but when Vaike went to return it, their hands never connected in the jovial manner Owain had been expecting.

They grabbed hands without meaning to, holding them in front of themselves as they stood in front of the open door to Chrom’s office, somewhere Owain wasn’t going to go again anytime soon and somewhere Vaike didn’t want to go in the first place. “You’re a great kid, never think otherwise,” his father told him, letting go of his hand to step inside the office. “Someday we’ll both be thought of as better than we are now, and there’s no way that’s gonna happen if we don’t make moves for it.”

His arm shaking as he did, Owain gave his father a thumbs-up, before the office door was closed and the discussion inside was started. Rather than just stand around, he went to the closest corner and sat in it, trying to make sure he was out of the way of the walkway so that no one could get mad at him for blocking their path. Once he got comfortable, he closed his eyes and let his mind run wild, imagining things that he would have been writing down had he not chosen to leave his notebook in his mother’s office. This was the kind of thing he liked doing when he was alone, building stories in his mind that he would later write down to look back on and laugh at in the future.

Predictably, everything involved either rewriting the course of his life to not be the burden on everyone’s existence he felt he was, or it was grand fantasies that had him playing the role of the smart and charming hero everyone deserved. And when his father came out of his uncle’s office minutes later, looking ashamed to be in the position he was in, and saw his son sitting in the corner like a punished child, it was easily one of the worst sights he could have seen. Owain, when alerted to the fact that the conversation was over, tried to explain that he’d put himself there and that he was daydreaming like he always did, but there was an unmentioned look of disbelief and pain in his father’s eyes as he looked down at him, because why would someone intentionally banish themselves like that?

As much as he would have liked there to have been, there was no way Owain was going to convince his father that he wasn’t regarding himself as a bad kid, and so he didn’t bother trying. “C’mon now, we’ve got t’go get your mother and use the money Chrom’s given us wisely this time, on the real necessities,” Vaike told him as he was getting out of the corner. “Otherwise I just got snapped at for nothin’, and that wouldn’t sit right with your old man.”

Seeing the look in his eyes not changing even after he was standing, Owain wanted to give some words of reassurance that everything would be okay, but he knew deep down that it would just get bad again soon enough. This time might not have been as bad as other times, but it was still not anything any of them had needed to have happen, and it was just the cherry on top of the already pretty awful day. There was always tomorrow, though, and they’d have to look forward to that.

* * *

The next morning, Owain hadn’t even made it to his locker before he’d been pulled away by Inigo for a private conversation, right inside the boys’ bathroom. “Dude, you have to let me at least get my stuff for class before you do this to me,” he told his friend, sounding displeased at where they were and the timing of it. “I don’t really want to get dragged into one of your weird plans and get into trouble again today.”

“Then it must be good for you that I didn’t pull you in here to concoct a plan, but rather have you tell me all you know about someone.” The sneaky smile on Inigo’s lips betrayed his words, as Owain could tell that whatever he said would be used as part of a plan to get someone to do something. “She was on my mind all night and I need to know more about her, but I cannot go to Brady about this. He’ll find it pretty weird that I want him to tell me all about his sister, but as you seem to know her as well, you could do the honors.”

“I find it weird that you want me to tell you about her!” There were two girls in Owain’s life that he considered sacred and that he felt he needed to protect from someone like Inigo, and Cynthia was one of them (Lucina, predictably, was the other), and being asked to divulge secrets about her was rubbing him the wrong way. “If you want to know her so bad, go get buddy-buddy with her somehow! I bet you could weasel your way into that group kinda like Brady did if you tried hard enough.”

Inigo shook his head, showing that he found the suggestion implausible. “I’ve been told exactly why it is Brady’s been taken to be part of their group, thanks to our dear friend Severa who wants nothing but to see you and me both burn to the ground, and it’s all to do with his sister. I can’t get in the same way.” He held up a hand with two fingers spaced apart slightly. “Just a small issue in the plan, you see.”

There wasn’t a whole lot of the previous day that Owain wanted to remember, but he distinctly remembered having learned that the day before when the topic had been approached. “Didn’t Cynthia herself tell us that yesterday or something? Why’d you not listen to it until Severa said something?”

“Every word that goddess said yesterday was music to my ears, but I’m afraid I took no meaning of anything from it.” Inigo shrugged. “Guess I must have missed her talking about it, which is a shame as I’m sure her explanation would have been lovely.”

“You just met her a day ago and you’re already in love with her, aren’t you?” Owain asked, not needing an answer because he could glean one from just looking at the dreamy expression Inigo’s face had slipped into having. “Here, I know I’m the one that gets lost in my thoughts sometimes, but why don’t you come back to reality and stop crushing on your friends’ relatives, huh?”

“Why are you wording that like you’re offended by this?” Shaking his head to try and clear it, Inigo pointed a finger in Owain’s face when he saw the blond narrowing his eyes as if his reason should have been crystal clear. “Firstly, I never crushed on your cousin, you merely accused me of it after I met her once because I said I thought she was cute. Secondly, I don’t see what the problem here is, we go to the same school as her so she’s on the table. And thirdly, the way you are refusing to help me out leads me to believe you feel the same way about her as I do!”

“What? Where would you get that idea?” Owain’s eyes went wide when he heard Inigo’s third point, because while the other two could have been argued to be true, that one was the single most incorrect thing he’d ever heard. “You know I get weird about girls, I don’t really like them, and besides, Cynthia’s basically a sister to me since she’s already Brady’s sister. I couldn’t ever do that to my best bud. Ever.”

He wanted to add something about how he couldn’t do that to either his mother or Brady’s mother, but he decided that bringing that up was inviting Inigo into a bunch of family backstory that he didn’t need to be treated to. “Yes, well, it’s clear that we’re going to be fighting for the affections of the same woman at some point, given that we’re as close as we are, so why not let it be her?”

“Because I don’t want it to be her!” His statement came out a lot louder than he had intended for it to have, and he quickly covered his mouth in surprise at what he’d said. Inigo had leaned back after he’d yelled, also surprised that it had happened, and he didn’t say anything aside from a muttered “well damn” that Owain probably wasn’t supposed to have heard.

“Is something the matter in here, gentlemen?” an adult voice asked from right outside the bathroom, sending shivers down Owain’s spine. He and Inigo both looked towards the open door, seeing a tall man with dark brown hair standing there looking at them. “There was some yelling as I walked by, and I want to make absolute sure that…hm.” He squinted towards Owain, who had gone stiff as a board upon realizing who this was investigating them. “Shall I inform your parents you are in here causing a ruckus, Owain?”

“N-no, sir, please don’t. Inigo and I were just arguing about something, but we’re friends and we’re over it. It won’t happen again.” The man nodded and went on his way, but even with that having happened Owain was still shaken that they’d been caught in their conversation. “Oh no, he’s going to tell my parents anyway. Or he’s going to tell Brady, and Brady’s going to tell his mom, and then my parents’ll find out that way…”

“Why would he tell Brady that we were arguing in the bathroom?” Inigo asked, confused at what had Owain so panicked. “That’s quite the odd jump you’ve made there.”

“Were you not paying attention yesterday during the assembly?” Inigo’s blank stare at Owain’s question told him that he, in fact, had not been paying attention to that detail. “That right there’s Brady’s dad, who _happens_ to also be Cynthia’s dad. Which would make all of this super awkward if he told his son that we were in here arguing, because of who we were arguing about.”

“I believe I’m seeing what you’re getting at now, even if I think there’s no chance that he heard what we were going on about. He must have just heard your loud voice get only louder, and assumed there was a fight happening.” Making a clicking noise with his tongue as he thought about anything else to add, Inigo gave an opening for Owain to make a rebuttal but never received one, which then led to him simply leaving the bathroom, the first bell of the school day minutes from ringing. Owain followed him out and headed for his locker, his mind racing with all the possibilities of what kind of trouble being caught yelling in the bathroom would get him in.

There was no trouble, thankfully, but later in the day when the gaggle of girls came walking by with Cynthia at the lead, her bubbly voice talking rapidly to the others in the group, he had to make sure he had a hand on Inigo to keep him from chasing them down. “I don’t know how anyone can listen to her talk like that all time,” Brady admitted, hanging his head as he tried to avoid being seen by any of the girls. “It’s a whole lot to have to process at once, and I don’t wanna have to do it all the time.”

“I’d gladly do it, if you want to get me an in with her.” Inigo’s response had both of his companions glaring at him, and Owain even lightly punched him with his bad hand to remind him it was not something he should have been saying. “I…mean, she must be quite the lovely lady to have such great friends.”

“They’re not that great. Lucy’s nice, but she’s the only one of the bunch other than Cynthia that I can say I like.” Shuddering, Brady noticed that the girls had stopped walking and were all facing in his direction, which made him crouch down to hide behind his friends. “And now they’ve found me and I’m never gonna get away from them again. If I have to spend one more minute listenin’ to Severa talk bad about you two while I’m stuck with that group, I’m just gonna start crying.”

Mention of the blonde bully made Inigo rethink his idea of wanting to be around Cynthia to listen to her talk, even if he didn’t say anything about it. “You know, maybe she’ll stop being rude if you do cry,” Owain pointed out. “Even if you crying will end up making someone feel bad, it could help us all out here.”

“So ya think I should do that?” he asked, as the group of girls came closer. Owain wished he could have given a verbal answer, but by the time he had a good one the girls were right there, so he merely nodded and hoped Brady had seen it before he was taken into the ranks of the girl group, his sister and all her friends flocking around him.

“I still don’t get why, out of all the people here in the school, it’s the youngest one that gets to spend his time with the pretty ladies and Severa,” Inigo said as they watched their friend leave without a struggle. “I mean, I get the reason for it, but it could have just been a one-time thing. Instead, it might just happen all the time, and we get to lose him because of it.”

“I’m sure they’ll stop with it eventually. He’s not going to need to be babied forever, not when he’ll learn to stand up to them sometime.” Owain tapped his chin in thought, before throwing out a suggestion: “Who knows, maybe they’ll realize he’s just like us and let us keep him! The weird kids have to stick together, don’t we?”

“Oh yes, because that’s how life works out. The weird kids also aren’t typically related to the good-looking and popular kids, yet here we are.” Without another word, Inigo was heading to class, leaving Owain standing by himself, trying to make sense of what his friend meant by what he’d just said. They’d been friends for years and he’d never brought up a brother-like figure until the day before, and he wasn’t sure what Inigo was implying with it. He shrugged it off, chalking it up to his friend trying to fit in with the relative thing, and decided to head off to class as well.


	4. The Mystery of the Brother

The mystery of the brother situation wasn’t something that was going to be solved easily, Owain found out, as he asked Inigo about it multiple times over the following days, each time ending in a snappish “I don’t have a brother, stop asking me” kind of response. Based on what little he did know, he tried asking Lucina about it, to see if she had any answers for him, but she seemed just as surprised as her cousin about the whole thing. “I’m afraid I know no one who’s told me they’re his brother,” she said, crushing Owain’s spirits with every word. “You might have to just accept that your friend’s a bit of a liar.”

“A liar? Inigo? He’s not like that, I promise! He’s just…hiding something from us, it seems!” An idea was brewing in Owain’s mind, taking this defeat as a springboard for his next great plan. All it would take was asking someone who would most definitely know if Inigo had a brother or not, aside from Inigo himself.

Making that happen was a lot easier said than done, as the plan required something of Inigo that he had never once done in all the time he and Owain had been friends: allow for them to hang out over at his house. Sure, Owain had met Inigo’s mom before, she was a nice lady, but he’d only seen her at school events and when she was picking Inigo up after they’d been hanging out together, and now solving this mystery directly involved needing to interact with her somewhere that she could be asked things. It was a risk that needed to be taken, given Owain’s curiosity on the matter, and so one day after school (and after a couple rejections upon asking the brother question), he approached Inigo with all the determination he could muster.

“If you’re here to ask once more about the brother thing, you aren’t getting an answer,” Inigo said before Owain could even open his mouth. “I’ve told you more times than I can count, I’m not talking to you about it.”

“Promise it’s not about that,” Owain replied, holding up both hands to show that he wasn’t crossing his fingers and invalidating his promise. “I was just wondering if maybe we could hang out this weekend or something? Brady’s gonna be with his dad so I can’t get stuck at his house, and you know how my family is…I’d like to be out of there for a few hours.”

Pausing before he answered, surprised that the question posed wasn’t about the same thing he’d been being pestered about for days now, Inigo almost gave a positive reply before his eyes narrowed. “How do I know you’re not lying about Brady’s whereabouts, huh? He never mentioned before that he’s with his dad this weekend.”

“He’s been talking about how he’ll be at his dad’s all _week_ , didn’t you hear him sniffling about how much he’s gonna miss his mom while she’s gone?” Owain knew that he was exaggerating things a tiny bit, as Brady hadn’t really been that bothered about his mom having to go out of town for the weekend for something relating to the job she had, but the way Inigo was looking at him showed that he might have gone a little too far. “Okay, well, he’s going to be at his dad’s, you can ask my mom and she’ll tell you that miss Maribelle’s going to be gone, just trust me on this.”

“Trusting you on anything proves to be difficult at times, Owain.” Sighing deeply, Inigo considered what had been suggested before shrugging, saying, “What’s the harm in a little hanging out? I don’t think I have anything happening this weekend. Your house as usual?”

“Uh, actually…” Now that his suggestion had been accepted, it was time to get Inigo to fall for the rest of the plan. “I was thinking maybe we could go to your house? We’ve been friends for years and I’ve never been!” He clasped his hands together in front of him, the fingers on one hand not bending very well over the other’s. “I promise you I won’t do anything to embarrass you in front of your parents, if that’s what you’re scared of!”

“You’re using this to see if I have a brother, aren’t you?” Inigo might not always have been the smartest guy, but he was able to see through Owain’s deception a lot quicker than had been expected. Still, he was a good friend through it all even if he wasn’t entirely on-board with what was happening. “I suppose I’ll ask my mother if you can come over, she’ll most likely say no like she always does but we can try.”

Victory was in the bag for Owain, and he thanked Inigo profusely for at least giving it a shot, conveniently forgetting to mention that he had, in fact, called out the overall goal of the get-together already. Now all he needed was for permission to be given and for a way to get over there if and when the time came. That was when he went to Lucina once more, begging her to give him a ride over to Inigo’s house if he was allowed to go over there. “I…don’t think I understand why you want me to take you when you have two perfectly-capable parents,” she said with a smile, making him flinch back at the way she was talking to him. “But I’ll admit, I’m a bit intrigued about what’s going on with all this so I suppose I could do it, if it doesn’t interfere with any plans I may have.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure it doesn’t!” Owain gave his cousin some finger-guns, although one of them looked a little forced compared to the other, and she remained smiling with that same small, thin smile on her lips. He was getting the impression that she wasn’t entirely thrilled with what he’d asked her to do, but he was not, under any circumstances, going to go to his parents about it. On one hand, his mother would probably have loved to go take him to a friend’s house and talk with his parents, but on the other his father would have most likely caused nothing but trouble if he had been chosen to go.

That was the ride issue settled, and after the next day at school the other issue was pushed aside as well: Inigo told Owain between two of their classes that he could come over either afternoon that weekend, as long as he wasn’t there too early and didn’t stay too late. _That_ was the ultimate victory Owain had been looking for, and it would have been a lie to say he hadn’t grabbed Inigo in a big hug, squeezing him as tightly as he could before Inigo snapped at him to let him go.

“Sorry, I just…do you know how great it is to know I’m going to a friend’s house that isn’t Brady’s? I’m so excited!” Pulling his arms from around his friend, Owain watched as Inigo’s facial expression showcased his full regret on making this happen, which crushed his spirits a small amount but nothing too terrible. He’d experienced a lot worse after moments of happiness, this wasn’t even comparable to some of those defeats. “We’re going to have so much fun though! Should I bring anything?”

“There’s no need to bring anything, I’m sure I know exactly how this will go.” Sighing, Inigo didn’t seem to want to elaborate further on what he’d just said, but Owain wasn’t going to let him say something like that without pressing into it. “No, seriously, there is nothing you need to bring, anything we will do will be at Mother’s insistence, not our own. If you expect this to be a fun afternoon you are sorely mistaken.”

“Mistaken? No way, any time spent at a friend’s house is fun, no matter what!” It wasn’t true, Owain had spent many days he could consider to not be fun alongside Brady at either of his homes, but he wasn’t going to admit that to Inigo. But he paused after that thought, looking around for any sight of their tall, dark, and apparently handsome friend, and shrugging when he wasn’t spotted. “Oh well, I’ll tell Brady what I’m doing this weekend later, I guess. Come on, let’s go to class before we’re late and get in trouble.”

For the rest of the day, Owain couldn’t focus on anything he was expected to do, something that happened any time he was excited for something that was to come, but even at the end of the day he wasn’t able to tell the person he was looking for what he needed to. After the day’s final bell he expected to see Brady and tell him how he was going to be spending one of the days that weekend without him, but while he saw the other people his friend tended to get roped up in hanging around, he didn’t see his friend at all. “You’re looking a bit lost,” Severa teased, as she approached him like she did most days after school, a smug look on her face. “You missing something?”

“Leave me alone, Severa, this isn’t anything to do with you,” he replied, going from looking around the hallway to getting into his locker, which she prevented by coming up behind him and slamming her hand on the door. “Seriously, go away! Just because everyone else likes you doesn’t mean I do!”

“What’d I tell ya about messing with Owain, huh?” That was Brady’s voice, timid yet a lot deeper than anyone expected coming from him, given how small he’d been up until recently, and it took a moment for Owain to recognize that it was really him. “Come on Sev, leave him alone! Don’t you need to be going and gettin’ someone right now?”

Backing away as quickly as she’d approached, Severa grumbled something under her breath before adding, “Yeah, but so what? My father can wait a few minutes for me to get done here before we leave, and I don’t need you pushing me around so…”

“I’m not pushin’ you around, I’m tellin’ you to leave Owain alone. He’s my friend, he doesn’t need you being mean to him.” Thanks to Brady’s appearance Owain was able to get into his locker and pull his belongings out, but before he could finish getting everything out Severa had gotten over the interruption and had slammed his locker closed on him, his bag trapped halfway in. “Sev, seriously? I’m gonna tell your dad you’re actin’ like this, he’s not going to like it at all!”

If that was supposed to be a threat that fazed Severa, it didn’t work, as she laughed and watched as Owain tried opening his locker again, only for her to slam it shut once again. “Okay, just because you don’t want to leave doesn’t mean I don’t want to,” he said, trying for a third time to open it. “Please, just listen to Brady and leave me alone.”

“See? Owain’s not having fun with this, you can’t do that. Go do what you’ve gotta, there’s always next time.” Whatever it was about what Brady was saying, it was enough to get Severa to admit defeat and leave the scene, leaving the two boys standing there. “Sorry about her, she’s just…I’unno, she’s just got it out for you or somethin’.”

“She always has, I’m used to it. Why’s she listening to you to get her to stop?” Having finally gotten everything out of his locker, Owain closed it on his own terms and turned to look up at Brady, right as his friend was giving a shrug with his broad shoulders. “Come on, you’ve got to have an answer for that. Bullies like her don’t just listen to anyone.”

“If it’s not to do with Cynthia, then I’ve got nothin’,” Brady answered, shrugging again. “She’s just real weird about me, and it’s only getting worse every time I see her. Which happens a lot, and I hate it.” He stopped speaking, looking at Owain with a wistful expression, before shaking it off. “Okay, but, what’ve ya been up to today? Felt like I didn’t really see much of ya.”

“Oh, didn’t really do much. Just kinda…made plans for this weekend since I won’t be able to hang out with you.” Owain proceeded to explain what was going on, and how he was going over to Inigo’s house for the sole purpose of solving that mysterious brother issue, and by the time he’d laid everything out Brady was trying his hardest not to look upset about it. “H-hey, don’t cry or anything! Whatever happens, next time I go over there I’ll totally invite you too, swear on my life!”

“It’s not that I’m sad I’m not invited, I’m sad that you’re replacin’ me with Inigo like this.” Sniffling, Brady was beginning to look like he was on the verge of tears, which was only making Owain more frantic in his promises that the next time they’d go together; however, a single laugh escaped Brady’s mouth that gave away the fact that he was playing with his friend’s emotions over the whole thing. “I understand why I’m not goin’, I’m not a jealous friend or anything, you know this. Next time we’ll make it an all of us thing, then it’ll all be okay and that’s what matters.”

The scare had been a bit more real to Owain than he’d liked, and even after they’d cleared the air between them and made absolute sure that everything was fine he was still a bit worried that he had actually hurt Brady’s feelings. But there wasn’t room for that fear to linger too long, especially once the weekend came and the meeting in unfamiliar territory was actually going to happen. The whole car ride over to Inigo’s house (which Lucina was silent on, her only remark being that the address was familiar to her), he thought about how he should’ve waited for a day when Brady could’ve done this with him, best friends needing to stick together through thick and thin.

He hadn’t chosen to wait, though, and he hoped that he wouldn’t come to regret that decision. As they pulled up to the address given to them, Lucina stopped the car right outside, looking out the window at the house with raised eyebrows. “Are you _sure_ this is the right place?” she asked, a question she’d posed a couple times previously due to her cousin’s nature of being slightly absentminded. He nodded, already opening his door, and she couldn’t help but softly laugh. “I’m going to trust you on that, Owain, but if Inigo’s pranked you I don’t want to hear a word of it when I come get you in a few hours.”

“He wouldn’t prank me, he’s my friend,” Owain retorted, sticking his tongue out at his cousin before slamming the door shut. As she drove off, he walked up to the front door of the relatively nice house not too far across town from where they lived, admiring the fact that it looked like a fun place to be. Why Inigo was never willing to invite him over before this, he wasn’t ever going to understand.

After knocking on the front door and waiting a couple moments, he started looking at everything sitting around the front step; there were a lot of flowers growing in small pots, each pot containing a different color of flower and them all being arranged into a rainbow. “That’s real cool,” he said to himself, enjoying how much thought had to have been put into that arrangement. “Wish we had flowers like that at home, but Morgan and bees…bad times right there.”

The door had opened while he’d been looking at the flowers, Inigo standing in its wake with his arms crossed in front of him. “Are you coming inside or not?” he asked, sounding impatient to get whatever was going to happen over with—something Owain found odd, as this was just a day where they were going to hang out together. Was he expecting something horrible to happen once they were both inside? Owain wasn’t one to dwell on that sort of stuff, though, and he snapped to attention from the flowers and made his way in, Inigo making sure to close the front door behind them. “You’re a bit earlier than we were expecting, so sorry if Mother isn’t ready to meet with you yet.”

“I’ve met your mom before,” Owain said, missing the point of what Inigo meant entirely. “She doesn’t have to meet me again.”

Pausing as he tried to decide how to react to that, Inigo shook his head and sighed. “You know what, Owain, let’s just…go to my room and do something. There’s not much in there but we’ll find something to do that isn’t stand around and wait for Mother to be ready. Come on, this way.” He directed him across the large main room of the house, into one of the many doors along one of its walls, telling him to ignore the lack of furniture in the room they crossed, as well as the mirrored wall they’d been walking towards the whole time. Once they were inside the small bedroom, which did have actual furnishings in it, Inigo gave a halfhearted arm flourish. “Here it is, my bedroom. Exactly what you expected, yeah?”

Owain didn’t know how to say what he was thinking, as he looked around the room. There was a bed and dresser, but everything else was rather plain. “I never took you as the kind of person to like a plain room,” he finally said, his eyes crossing over the pictures of flowers on the walls. “You like so much cool stuff, why’s this place so lame?”

“It’s not lame, I just…don’t spend a lot of time in here. Sleeping and that’s it.” Inigo sat on the edge of his bed, kicking one leg up onto it before he began stretching, effortlessly grabbing onto the foot that was propped up. “Most of my free time is spent out in the open dance studio right outside my door. And if I’m not in there, I’m…” He trailed off as Owain looked at him, waiting for him to finish his statement. “No, no, I cannot say that.”

“You keeping secrets from me, Inigo?” Owain asked with a laugh, but the serious glare he received in return made his blood run cold. “O-okay, never mind then, jeez. So, what were you thinking we could do in here for ‘fun’, since there’s really nothing? We gonna tell stories or something like that?”

“That’s something you would enjoy, but no.” Finishing his stretch, Inigo stood up and walked to his dresser, opening the bottom drawer and pulling out a box from within it. “I was thinking more along the lines of making letters to hang on the locker of a certain bully of ours. She’s been rather…vicious as of late, hasn’t she?”

He was speaking of Severa, Owain knew this, but as he thought about her he could only think about how she had been rude to him until Brady told her off. “Yeah, guess so, but, uh, when isn’t she? She runs scared when Brady’s around though, I’ve seen it happen. A couple times now, actually.”

“Yes, yes, we know that she’s terrified of him. Except she’s not ‘terrified’, really, she’s just trying to impress him or something.” Inigo had opened the box, taking out all sorts of old magazines and ads that he must’ve been saving up for this exact sort of situation. “We make her a cutesy letter thinking that he sent it to her, we confuse her, we get her off our backs forever and onto his! It’s foolproof!”

“Inigo, this feels more like…I don’t know, something we shouldn’t be doing.” The fact that Owain had spent a lot of time reading about real-life kidnappings where ransom notes were made, and that he knew that what Inigo was suggestion was making those exact kinds of notes to send to Severa, made this whole situation feel wrong to him. “Maybe we could make things and not send them to her?”

“Are you suggesting that we use all this for _fun_? Not ridding our lives of her?” He was fanning out the magazines, to show off everything he had saved up for this situation. “Come on, there’s no harm that can come from this except potentially losing Brady as a friend, but he’s not that important to you, is he?”

Owain could feel himself shrinking away from Inigo mentally, even if his physical body stayed there in the room. He wasn’t prepared to hear something like that be said to him about his lifelong best friend, someone who he cared about like a brother and would do anything to make happy. There wasn’t any way he could agree with Inigo on that one, but he had the fear that disagreeing would get him kicked out without any sort of closure on why he’d come over in the first place. “He is important to me,” he finally mumbled, trying to clear his head so that he could focus on what was happening. “I can’t hurt him by making Severa go after him, she’ll hate him like she hates us.”

“Hurt him? Owain, have you misunderstood what we’re going to do?” Setting the magazines down and grabbing a pair of scissors out of the box, Inigo snipped them a couple of times before placing them on the floor as well. “We’re going to make her a _love_ letter, you idiot! She’ll think someone’s in love with her, and since she’s clearly trying to impress Brady she’ll think he’s the responsible one and chase after him forever! Sure, he’ll not be amused that we set her up with him but that’s a small casualty, I’d say.”

Hearing the explanation made Owain feel a bit better about what was happening but he still wasn’t fully able to accept the idea of involving his best friend in something he wasn’t able to agree to. “I really don’t think we should do that, sorry. If Brady was here and we could ask him if he wanted to—”

“Asking him will get us nowhere, I’m sure he hasn’t noticed that Severa’s playing hard-to-get with him and he’d accuse us of lying to him! Now just start finding good words for me to cut out, I know you can’t use a pair of scissors to save your life.” It was the first time Owain had ever heard Inigo raise his voice in an angry manner, and he hoped it was going to be the last if he went along with what was expected of him. Thankfully, the sound of him yelling caused for someone to knock at the door moments later, a soft voice outside the room asking for permission to come inside. Inigo sighed, glaring at Owain as he replied, “Yes, Mother, you can come inside to see what we’re doing.”

The door opened slowly, and the woman Owain recognized as Inigo’s mom came inside, a soft smile on her lips and water actively dripping down her face from her wet hair. “I was wondering if you’d forgotten what you need to do today,” she said, after giving Owain a nod acknowledging that he was present. “Practice waits for nothing, not even a friend being over to visit.”

“Mother! Me, practice, in front of Owain? I can’t, he’ll make fun of me and I’ll never hear the end of it!” It was clear that Inigo was regretting his moment of letting his mother come into the room, especially after she’d fully opened his door and taken to standing right in the doorway, preventing him from shutting her out or being able to escape around her. “Can we push it until after he leaves? He won’t be here all day, we made sure of that.”

“I’unno, I kinda want to see what this ‘practice’ thing is about,” Owain remarked, never having heard much about what Inigo actually _did_ in his free time (aside from when they were at his house, or out somewhere together, then it seemed the answer was whatever they were doing in that moment). “It can’t be that bad, whatever it is.”

Inigo slowly turned to look at Owain, his chest rising as he took in a deep, angered breath, but it was his mother who spoke before he got the chance. “Oh, it’s not bad at all! Inigo must spend an hour every day practicing his dancing, or else his instructors will catch on to his slacking and they’ll kick him from classes!”

“Hold on, classes? Inigo, why haven’t you told me about this before? This sounds cool!” Now Owain had caught on to why Inigo was basically glaring at him, but he wasn’t observant enough to realize that this was stuff Inigo hadn’t wanted him to know. “Do you think you’d like it more if you had a friend to join—”

“Absolutely not!” Jumping to his feet, Inigo started pacing around the bedroom to calm himself, nearly kicking the scissors he’d laid out on the floor in the process. The moment his foot got dangerously close to them, his mother dove to the ground to retrieve them, nearly knocking her son over in the process. Rather than thank her for the trouble, Inigo looked to the now-clear doorway and made a break for it without another word to either person in the bedroom before leaving.

In the aftermath of what had happened, Owain did what he figured was the gentleman-like thing to do and helped Inigo’s mother back to her feet. “Sorry that I made Inigo mad, I guess, miss Olivia. Does he do this a lot?”

“He’s just a bit secretive about his dancing skills, I suppose. He doesn’t like people knowing because he doesn’t think he’s good enough for people to care. I understand that feeling, but he doesn’t need to go to extremes like this to preserve his secret.” Olivia was a sweet woman, and she was soft-spoken and kind and so much like Owain liked to think his mother would be if she weren’t always being put in stressful situations, and he felt comfortable just standing in his friend’s bedroom with her. But she didn’t seem to feel the same, her eyes actively searching the room once they were both to their feet. “Um, you wouldn’t mind just staying in here while I go find Inigo, would you?” she asked, revealing the reason for her uneasiness. “I don’t like that he’s stormed off like this, he never acts to these extremes…”

Nodding, Owain let her know that he didn’t mind at all, and so she left in a hurry, calling out her son’s name once she was past the doorway. Now that he was alone, Owain sat back down on the floor and started looking at the magazines Inigo had pulled out before, noticing that, aside from the top one, which was a typical gossip magazine, they were all more “adult” in nature. He recognized the titles as being things he was told to stay away from, and the curiosity of wanting to know why that was existed within him, but he couldn’t bring himself to look past the covers, which were of nearly-nude women. The moment he heard footsteps coming back his way he threw the safe magazine back on top and pretended like he hadn’t moved anything around, a decision that proved wise as it was Olivia, still with scissors in hand, that came back to the room.

“I’m sorry about all this, but he doesn’t want to speak with you at the moment,” she said, placing the scissors on her son’s bed so that she didn’t lose them. “However, he said he would consider it in a little bit, so…would you care for something to eat while you wait?” Her offer was genuine and while Owain was hurt that Inigo was acting like this, he wasn’t going to take it out on his mother.

“I think that sounds good,” he replied as he came to his feet once more, following her out of the room, through the studio-slash-living room and to the kitchen, where she drew him a chair before pulling out the selection of snacks she had available to him. As he figured it would be, it was all natural and all healthy, something that he was more than fine with, especially when it meant he could have whatever fruit he wanted. “My mom cuts up my apples for me still, even though I’m not a baby and could maybe do it myself,” he said as he watched Olivia wash off the apple he’d picked out. “I don’t think apples _need_ to be cut though, right? You can just eat them like that and that’s fine.”

“Your mother babies you because she loves you, don’t ever forget that. I’d baby Inigo if he allowed me to, but he’s insistent that he’s grown and doesn’t need it.” Olivia sighed, sounding genuinely upset that her son treated her that way. Once she’d handed Owain his fruit she moved on to doing other tasks, and even as he was eating he found himself watching her, seeing how she spun around the kitchen on her toes as she moved around doing various things. After she completed whatever it was she was doing, she left the kitchen area and headed to the studio, sitting directly in the middle of the floor and stretching her legs out, breaking into a full stretching routine almost as if she’d forgotten she had someone watching her.

It turned out that she had, in fact, forgotten that Owain was watching her, as the first time she looked in his direction after she’d started stretching she let out a loud scream, visibly panicked for a second before she calmed down, realizing who it was that was there. The scream not only worried Owain, but it caused another door in the house to slam open, Inigo bursting into the room as fast as he could. “Mother! Is everything okay?”

“Y-yes, I was just startled by seeing your friend, it wasn’t anything bad I promise. I just…I wanted to have family practice time and you refused so I…” Going back to stretching, Olivia didn’t say anything else to either of the boys, but Inigo knew what he had to do to make things right.

He looked at Owain, who was wide-eyed and a bit worried about if him staying there was going to make more screaming happen. “Stay right there, don’t say a word about what you’re going to see, not now and not ever, got it?” The seriousness in Inigo’s voice made going against his words impossible, so he merely nodded and waited to see what was about to happen next. “Thank you, I would hate for Mother to get spooked again or for anyone at school to know that I do this sort of thing.”

“Wait, what sort of thing?” It was proof that Owain only half-paid attention to anything that was going on around him at any point in time, but he was soon clued into what he was not supposed to talk about. Inigo went over to his mother’s side and joined her in stretching out on the floor, and after they’d spent a good amount of time making sure they were flexible enough they stood and began doing what looked like warm-up dance moves. Those warm-ups quickly turned into full pieces of dance routines, pieces they repeated over and over again with small tweaks each time they ran through them.

It was beautiful to see and would have been even more beautiful if Owain knew anything about professional dancing beyond the fact that it was hard. He was entranced in watching them, seeing how they worked together and would break from doing something so that the other could take center “stage” for a moment; he was so busy focusing on watching them that he hadn’t even begun to notice how long he’d been sitting there. They took a couple long breaks, for drinks and snacks, that they included him in, but other than that it was entirely him watching them do their thing.

This wasn’t how he’d intended to spend his day, but there was no way he was going to complain about it, especially not when he found himself actually having fun watching them. Part of him was begging to ask if he could participate, but the rest of him was aware that he had zero experience and they had years upon years of it, and if he jumped in he’d most likely just be getting underfoot. That took a bit away from the beauty of watching them, but he moved past it when he saw them both stop in the middle of a dance move they’d done several times already that afternoon—and it was then that he realized someone was shaking the doorknob on the front door, trying to get in.

“Don’t worry, I’ll check it,” Inigo said as he ran past his friend towards the door, his mother standing in the studio area slightly panting and waiting for his return. That very return came with Inigo looking worried, his worry not aimed at his mother even slightly as he only spoke to Owain when he’d come back. “Listen, the ‘don’t say a word’ thing doesn’t just apply to the dancing, okay?” he asked, putting his hands on Owain’s arms and grabbing them tightly. “There are some things that are better left not explained to everyone.”

Owain’s mouth opened to say something but he couldn’t find any words to use to verbalize what he’d thought. This was beginning to feel like he was wrapped up in some kind of illegal situation and he wasn’t going to come out of it with all his limbs, and he felt like he’d been tricked with the dancing he’d seen. “You shouldn’t be ashamed of your family,” Olivia told her son as she walked towards him, having realized that their dance session was over. “Let me guess, it was your brother at the door, wasn’t it?”

Wincing at the bluntness of the statement, and not daring to look towards Owain to see his reaction, Inigo let go of his friend and went back towards the door. “It’s all of them, it’s a wonder that none of them thought to take their keys with them today.”

“I did ask them to not, so that they wouldn’t come in and surprise our guest with their appearance.” The way Olivia spoke was still soft and sweet, but Owain wasn’t able to find comfort in her words. In fact, he was pretty sure that she’d told people to not take their keys with them so that they couldn’t come into the house and murder him without her being aware they were back. “Let them in, he deserves to meet them all, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know if I want to…” Owain said under his breath, but there was no stopping Inigo from letting them inside, especially since whoever was on the other side of the door had taken to knocking on it loudly. He gulped when he heard the door open, followed by what sounded like several people filing in, all giving Inigo some form of hello as they passed him. As they came into the kitchen area, Inigo coming in behind them to stand by his friend, who was looking at everyone confused, they were all clearly waiting for some kind of explanation as to what was going on, as was Owain. “Hey, the way your mom was talking, it sounded like everyone was going to hurt me or something. But who _are_ these people?”

Inigo took in a deep breath, before pointing at the lone woman in the group who’d come inside. “That’s Cherche,” he said, as his hand moved to gesturing towards the man next to her, who was laughing at the introductions happening, “and that’s Henry. They live here with us because…er, well, it’s a long story I don’t want to tell you. They just live here, how about that? And that,” his hand was moving towards the next person, someone Owain recognized as being from school, “that’s Gerome. No big deal.”

“I was wondering why Lucina messaged me asking why she’d dropped her cousin off at my house,” the one labeled as Gerome said, face turned so that Owain couldn’t keep staring at it. “This is stupid, I’m not dealing with this today.” Without anything else to say, he left the lineup and went straight into one of the other rooms that were adjacent to the studio area, slamming his door shut while the people Owain assumed were his parents stood in place and didn’t say a word.

“Don’t mind him, he’s never eager to talk to anyone.” Inigo looked towards the door that had just been shut for a moment, before shaking his head and looking back at Owain. “As for Father, he’s not home yet but he’ll let himself in when he gets here, I assume. Mother, you didn’t make him leave his keys here too, did you?”

Olivia seemed a bit shocked to be called out to as she was, but she wasn’t the one who answered Inigo’s question. Instead it was Cherche who spoke, sounding completely dry as she said, “He would never think to leave his keys anywhere, if it meant being locked out from his dearest wife and child.” At her last few words, Henry started laughing once more, nearly doubling over with his chuckles, and he had to pull himself a chair and sit down to collect himself.

Of course, he happened to sit right across from Owain, who was very confused at what was happening around him, and he wasn’t getting any answers from Inigo about it all. “You’re a new face around here, kid,” he started, trying his hardest not to laugh over his own words. “It’s good to see Inigo having friends! He’s never had anyone over before, it’s kind of a big deal that you’re here!”

“Henry, don’t embarrass me in front of him. I don’t need him being scared to ever come back.” Inigo was getting into his own chair next to Owain as he spoke, trying to be protective of his friend from what he figured was about to come. “I figured it’d be safe as long as you didn’t walk in the door, but here you are and now everything’s going to be ruined.”

The two of them went back and forth for a little while, Henry finding what Inigo was saying hilarious most of the time while Inigo was just trying to caution him into being careful about what he said. Owain wasn’t sure what he was supposed to make of what was going on, but he didn’t want to interject and make things more difficult than they currently were. He could hear the two women starting to talk about something, them having moved into the studio area, but he didn’t know what it was they were discussing, and he wasn’t going to ask and seem rude to the two people talking beside him.

When Lucina arrived to pick him up an hour or so later, he was shown out the door by Inigo and his mother, the other two adults right behind them, and he was walked to the car by Inigo alone. “I’m really, truly sorry about all of that,” he apologized, much to Owain’s confusion. “You see, my family’s got a bit of a quirk to it, and while I know you have a large family as well at least you know you’re all related.”

“So they’re family too?” Owain asked, thinking back to what had started this whole visit: the fact that Inigo insisted he had a brother, but wasn’t willing to elaborate. “But I thought, just looking at him, that—”

“We have different mothers, that much we’re certain of. Fathers, on the other hand, is where it gets tricky.” Already they were at the car, Owain’s hand on the handle and Lucina sitting inside looking unamused that he was taking up more of her time than expected. “Do yourself a favor and don’t think too hard about it, he’s my brother but he might not be. Does that make sense?”

“It’s going to have to,” he replied, opening the car door and bidding his friend goodbye and thanks for the time at his place. The moment he closed the door and buckled in so Lucina could take him home, he saw his cousin looking at him expectantly, almost as if she was waiting for him to tell her something. “Uh, you brought me to the right place earlier, and I get why you were so confused about it now.”

“Let me guess, they’re related, aren’t they?” she asked, putting the car in drive and heading off for home. She took Owain’s silence for a positive answer, and smiled in response. “Knew it the moment I dropped you off. No wonder Gerome’s got so many stupid stories about him, only relatives would know that much about someone.”

The thought to ask about what kind of “stupid stories” she was talking about crossed Owain’s mind, but it was immediately ignored in order for something much more pressing. “Wait, do you tell him stupid stories about _me_?”

Two could play at the non-answer game, and that was exactly what Lucina did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I am SO sorry this took me so long to write. Like...I have wanted to write this particular part of this story for so long and I let other projects get in the way of it. I promise there won't be that long of a gap in posting again.  
> Secondly, I have been so eager to write the Inigo family situation since I came up with it years ago. I'm glad I was pressured into doing so rather early in this story. The next chapter focuses on a different family situation, then an Actual Plot chapter, and that'll be followed by another family situation chapter. After that? Well, that's up to any readers and what they want to see be focused on outside of the Actual Plot. c:


	5. The Unwanted Sister

On the same day that Owain and Inigo were having their “playdate”, Severa was sitting in her bedroom, her legs dangling over the side of her bed as she sat, pouting, with her eyes fixated on her door. “I cannot believe Mother dearest grounded me for something so stupid!” she grumbled, putting a fist to her cheek as she rested her elbow on her leg, leaning forward but never breaking contact with the door. “I didn’t even do anything wrong this time, she’s just being an idiot for thinking I deserve to be grounded for it!”

As her voice raised, the sound of someone shuffling on the other side of the door became more pronounced, until she was screaming her last words and the person pushed the door open just a crack. “I think you did a lot wrong and deserved getting grounded,” a tiny voice said through what was open, Severa glaring daggers at the sound. “You called Mother names and told her that no one loves her, that’s a big lie and you shouldn’t have said it.”

“It’s not a lie,” she spat in return, not moving from her spot on the bed. “Now go bother someone who cares about you, I don’t want to hear you right now!” She heard the sigh on the other side of the door, the person there pulling it closed after a couple moments of consideration. “That’s right, abandon me like your parents abandoned you, see how much that makes me care about you.”

The words she’d just said stung to actually hear, and if it were possible to take something back that was one of those things Severa would have in a heartbeat (even though she was currently in trouble for saying something just as bad to someone’s face). She might have been young when it had happened, but she’d heard the story of how her younger sister had been adopted into the family every year on what they assumed was her birthday. She’d heard of how she was left on their front step, barely alive when she was found, and how her parents had taken her as their own because they had wanted to give their one child a younger sibling but weren’t sure how they’d wanted to go about it.

She’d been considered a gift from Naga, but she was honestly just a gift that Severa would have loved to return. “This is just so stupid,” she said to herself after getting past the fact that she’d crossed a line with her previous comment. “Mother always sees me as doing so much wrong, she can’t ever see _her_ as doing anything wrong at all! She could kill someone and she’d be forgiven because she was a special delivery, but I look at someone the wrong way and I’m grounded for life. How unfair.”

There was a quick knock at the door, before it was pushed open, the person from before coming in with tears in her eyes. “I wouldn’t kill anyone,” the little girl said, looking horrified at the possibility. “That wouldn’t be nice and Father and Mother both would be so unhappy with me if I did it.”

“Shut up, I really don’t care what you have to say.” Severa’s cold reaction to her sister’s entrance made the girl’s eyes widen further, tears beginning to stream down her cheeks, but before she had the chance to antagonize her further, a redhaired woman bustled into the room, shooting Severa the same daggered glare that she had been giving the younger girl. “M-mother! What are you doing in here?”

“Listening in on your temper tantrum, that’s what.” Crouching down to wipe tears away from the younger girl’s face, Cordelia shook her head as she could hear Severa behind her sputtering things about how it wasn’t a tantrum and it wasn’t fair to come into her room unannounced. “You should heed your own advice, your defense isn’t anything I care to listen to right now. You need to be kinder to Nathalie, she has done nothing to you in your life to deserve such hatred from you.”

Scowling at hearing her sister’s proper name, Severa leaned over so she could see the younger girl’s face as it was brightening with the love and affection she was being shown. “I’d say her showing up and taking your attention off of me makes me not like her,” she replied, fairly certain that her mother was rolling her eyes at the response. “I’d be better off an only child, without dumb, ugly Nah around here.”

“I’m not going to justify that with a proper reply, your rudeness doesn’t deserve our time.” Standing back up, Cordelia offered a hand to the girl, who took it without hesitation. “Nathalie and I are going to go to the park, you’d be invited along if you weren’t misbehaving as you are. A girl your age should have gotten over this behavior years ago, yet here you are, still acting much like a child.”

As the two of them left the room, Severa saw Nah turn around and stick her tongue out at her, before acting like she hadn’t done anything wrong and continuing on her way. Since they’d left the door open, she had to get up to close it, and as she did so she heard the mother and daughter having a conversation that was definitely about her, talking about how life would be happier if she wasn’t so negative all the time. “I’d be less negative if I had a family that actually cared about me,” she said, knowing that she wasn’t going to be heard, and she slammed her door to make her point. “I’m the unwanted child in my own house, by the parents that raised me since I was born! And for what, for _her_? For Nah? For someone that wasn’t wanted by her own parents?”

This was an argument she made every time she got in trouble for something she saw as insignificant, even though by the end of the day she’d come to terms with the fact that she had done something slightly wrong. Her hatred for her younger, adopted sister, though, was not something she was able to push past at all, and was something she’d been grappling with for almost as long as she could remember; she knew she was meant to be an only child, and having her sister around was stopping that from happening.

But even still, even with this animosity towards her, the worst Severa would ever do to her was call her by the rude nickname she’d given her the moment her parents had named her. They’d picked a fancy-sounding name to give their rescue baby, and when they’d told their actual daughter she’d turned up her nose at it and insisted they pick something else. When there wasn’t any changing the name, Severa then took it upon herself to give her a better, different name, and that was how she’d become Nah to her, while everyone else tended to call her something not as insulting. If anything, at least Nah understood that it _was_ her name as far as Severa was concerned, and she responded to it as if it really was.

That was something that angered their parents, the mistreatment of one sister from another, but until Severa felt she was being seen as an equal to her sister she wasn’t going to treat her any better than she currently did. “I deserve to go to the park with Mother, and to go get ice cream with Mother, and to watch movies and all that other stuff with her,” she told herself, pacing around her room as she kept herself in her exiled state. “It shouldn’t just be Nah getting to do it, it should at least be both of us, if not just me! Why is it that Mother hates me so much that she always picks Nah over me?”

Her pacing stopped as she sighed, standing by her bedroom door once more. “I mean, I know why she does it, it’s because I’m me and she doesn’t like me. She doesn’t like that I…that I…” Her thought trailed off and she jumped for the door, throwing it open and running down the hall to Nah’s bedroom, which was covered in signs warning anyone that wasn’t a parent to not enter without permission. Severa ignored them, as she knew she was home alone, and went into the darkened bedroom that remained eerily dark even after she turned the lights on, the window blocked by thick curtains. “I know it’s got to be in here somewhere, Nah never shuts up about it if she starts talking about it…”

The door behind her creaked closed, adding further to the eerie vibe that the room was giving off, but Severa didn’t pay any attention to it, pulling open the lower-most drawer of her sister’s dresser and grabbing handfuls of clothing out from inside of it. She didn’t seem to find what she was looking for in it, and shoved everything back as she closed it and opened the next one. After she was finished ransacking the dresser, finding nothing but clothes that had been neatly-folded before she’d gotten to them, she went to the closet, sliding open the door and looking inside of it, staring straight past the towering boxes of belongings and instead looking at what was stacked between them.

“This shouldn’t be so hard, she couldn’t have hidden it, otherwise she’d need her dearest Mommy and Daddy to help her find it every time she’s looking for it.” Having found nothing in the closet and not wanting to get too deep into digging through those boxes, Severa closed the door and went over to the bed, throwing the pillows onto the floor and expecting to find what she was looking for underneath them. All she found was a pile of neatly-organized animals that hadn’t been touched since they’d been stacked, and she grumbled at her poor luck in finding what she was looking for. “Did she really take it with her? That’d be just perfect, her bothering Mother about it all day.”

Shaking her head, Severa at least went through the motions of putting everything in the room somewhat how it had been when she’d come in, trying to leave it the same so that no one could guess she’d been tearing it apart in search of something. As she stomped back down the hall to her own bedroom, not caring how loud she was being because she was still there alone, she found herself slowing as she got to her door, her mind begging for her to go somewhere else that wasn’t where she was supposed to be. She was standing fully in her doorway, her bed in her sights, when she gave into the idea of some more unsupervised exploration of the house.

She ran down the stairs as quickly as she could, laughing as she got to the lower floor of the house. All of the lights were off, and due to most of the windows in the house having dark-colored curtains it gave the impression that it was a lot closer to nighttime than it actually was, but Severa wasn’t bothered by that. She was on a mission at that point, and nothing was going to stop her unless it was someone coming home. That, or, as she found out, the door to the bedroom she was going to try going through being locked. Pouting as she tried turning the doorknob, being met with resistance she wasn’t going to overcome, she thought about any other places she could go that she shouldn’t have been hanging around while being technically grounded.

“I wonder if they locked the other door in,” she said to herself, sneaking into the bathroom that also connected to the bedroom she was attempting to enter, but there she was also met with the same issue of no entry. However, it wasn’t typical for that bathroom to look so…used, she knew, and that meant that someone had been a bit careless that morning when getting ready for the day. “Mother hates when this place looks like a mess, but guess what? It’s a mess already, she won’t notice if I move around a few things.”

Her hand reached straight for a bottle that was sitting on the counter, grabbing it with the intent of moving it elsewhere, but when she touched it she could feel the slimy contents having gotten stuck to the outside. She grimaced, turning the sink on and washing her hands as fast as she could, gagging as she looked at the bottle and saw that it was some kind of jelly that seemed to be for a more personal use. “Ew, how could they just leave this out like this? Me and Nah are _children_ , they’re corrupting us with their gross behavior!”

Pausing as the words left her mouth, she gagged again at the fact that she’d considered her sister in her complaint. “Why do I care if baby Nah’s been corrupted? It’d serve everyone right, her ending up some disgusting freak because of how badly they raised her. No one gets to be spoiled their whole life and get away with it, nope!”

Now that she knew not to touch the bottle, she went through the bathroom and snooped through everything that she could, finding a variety of pill bottles, soaps, and other personal care items that made her uncomfortable to see. This _was_ her parents’ bathroom, after all, even if it had a door to the main floor of the house, she shouldn’t have been doing too much looking around in it. But where would the fun of that had been, if she’d just kept to herself and didn’t try to cause trouble whenever she had the chance?

The sound of a car door closing outside made her freeze where she was standing, before she heard the familiar sound of the car being locked; that was undeniably her father Libra coming home, most likely to check on her, and if he caught her somewhere she shouldn’t have been (because naturally her mother would have told him that she was grounded and needed to be in her room) he would force an even worse punishment on her. But if he was already outside and locking the car, that meant she didn’t have the time to get back into her room and make it look like she’d never left. She needed to come up with some reason for why she was currently downstairs, and fast, before her life got a whole lot worse.

Thankfully, her father was a kind and understanding man, even when his daughter was in trouble, and when he came inside to see her making her way up the stairs with a cup in her hand he gently called out to her, “Severa, dear, aren’t you supposed to be in your room?”

“I got thirsty,” she lied, knowing that the cup she was holding was completely empty, “and I’m not desperate enough to drink from the sink up here when there’s cupboards of cups downstairs for me to use.”

“You wouldn’t be expected to drink from the sink,” he told her, beginning to follow her up the stairs which only made her move faster, needing to get into her room with just enough time to pretend she drank the water she’d gotten. “You’re just as welcome to the kitchen as anyone else in the house it, I don’t understand why you think that just because you’re in trouble you lose these privileges. Has someone said something to you that’s caused you to believe such a thing?”

“N-no, Father, no one has.” That was the truth, Severa hadn’t ever been told by anyone that she was less of a member of the family than anyone else, but it was a believe she had taught herself due to her parents’ focus on her younger sister. “I just thought, you know how Mother is, she hears I got out of my room and she goes on the hunt to put me back.”

“Severa, I am not your mother but I can speak for her when I say she would never deny you a basic need. She’s been so instrumental in assisting so many orphaned children learning that they deserve food and water, I know she would never tell her own child she cannot have what she needs.” While she was already getting into her room, Libra was most of the way up the stairs, coming in fast, and soon enough he was there in the doorway, a non-threatening presence despite being her father. “Now, are you going to tell me what you did to deserve being grounded today, or will I have to take your mother’s account?”

“I told her no one loves her, you know, the usual thing.” Speaking nonchalantly, as if she wasn’t bothered by how rude she’d been to her mother, Severa hopped onto her bed, throwing the still-empty cup onto the floor. “Probably what she told you, I don’t know why you wanted me to tell you too.”

He remained in the doorway, pinching the bridge of his nose as he closed his eyes in frustration at how his daughter didn’t care that she was being rude. “She mentioned that you also called her some rather unflattering names, are you going to own up to that as well?”

“Why not? She heard it, Nah heard it—”

“Your sister’s name is not Nah, stop calling her that.” There was a coldness in his voice as he snapped at her, catching her by surprise as she was used to her father maintaining his composure while dealing with her; he did apologize for getting so verbally rough before continuing on with his point. “Her Naga-given name is Nathalie, you should begin to respect that and call her it.”

“I can call her ‘it’ if you want me to,” she replied, smirking as she spoke. “I just thought, hey, it’s always cool for a big sister to nickname her little sister, but I guess I’m so much of a screw-up that my nickname for her isn’t good enough.”

“You haven’t given her a nickname, you’ve belittled her existence for as long as you’ve been able to speak down to her. A little respect goes a long way, Severa, and it would do you a lot of good to begin to understand that.” Sighing, he opened his eyes, looking at her and the defiant smirk she still wore on her face. “At this rate, you’re going to pick a fight at school that we won’t be able to save you from, because you think it’s appropriate to speak to people like this.”

Severa’s face fell for a moment, before she snorted in laughter, “Like you actually care about me and what I do at school. You’re all about work-work-work and Mother’s all about Nah and her work and never me, it should be about me sometimes and it never is.”

“Sounds like someone needs to pay more attention to things outside of her personal bubble, the world does not focus on just one person at any given time and the fact that you expect it to might be part of why you have so many issues.” If this had been a typical one of their father-daughter conversations, Libra would have walked into the room and sat on his daughter’s bed, stroking her hair and allowing for her to cry into his shoulder, but he remained firmly planted in the doorway. “I hope that you’ll learn to see things as everyone else sees them, without making yourself the center of attention.”

“That’s not my problem, you all neglect me and choose to care more about Nah than your own actual daughter.” Severa was not going to give up her end of the fight, it was something she’d been arguing for as long as she could remember and she was sure it wasn’t going to be resolved anytime soon. But when she saw her father step back out of the doorway, without coming in and assuring her that things would turn out okay, she initially wondered if maybe she’d pushed him too far. “Er, Father? Aren’t you going to, you know, come let me cry a bit until Mother gets home?”

“I would love to, but I don’t have the time at the moment. Cordelia asked if I would stop in to check on you while she was still out, but I’m still needed at the orphanage for the day. We can have our typical crying session once I get home later, if that’s fine by you.” It wasn’t fine by her but there was no chance that she was going to get him to change his mind on going back to work, not when his job meant so much to him. The children he assisted with at the orphanage needed the love and attention just as much as she did, and she respected that even if she hated that it ate into her own time with her father.

She remained silent and gave him no answer, which he expected from her, and soon he was gone, leaving her at home by herself once more. Rather than resume her attempts to get into places she shouldn’t have been, she stayed on her bed, kicking her feet and grumbling things about how much she despised her family and how she wished she could have been anywhere else there in that moment. It wasn’t even that her so-called friends had better families than she did, it was just that at least their families made the attempt to include her and make her feel loved when she was with them. Her own family could barely manage to do that, no matter how much they insisted they loved both girls equally.

Thinking about the families of her friends and how great they seemed to be carried her through the rest of her time alone in the house, to the point that she wasn’t paying attention when footsteps came running up the stairs. “Severa, I wish you’d been able to come to the park with me!” Nah called out, jumping into Severa’s bedroom without being invited in. “There was no one else there so we could’ve had actual fun on the swings for a change. Wouldn’t that have been fun?”

“Oh, totally, because high schoolers have fun swinging with their baby sisters.” Trying not to seem annoyed that the privacy of her bedroom had been ignored, Severa replied to Nah as honestly as she could—but her attention was caught by something hanging around her neck, what looked like a picture on a string. “Wait, did you seriously take _that_ with you to the park? Were you expecting something to happen?”

“Huh? Take what?” Nah seemed surprised that something was being pointed out to her, but then she looked down at what was around her next and she chuckled, grabbing it and taking it off of herself. “Oh, this? I sort of _have_ to take it with me everywhere I go, just in case I fall or hit my head.”

“It’s a picture of your friends.” There was the annoyed tone in Severa’s voice, as she got off her bed and walked directly in front of Nah, grabbing the picture from her hand and holding it up above her. “Why would you need this if you fall down? Do you think you’ll forget them if you don’t always have them around?”

Nah scrunched her face in disgust at how she was being treated, trying to reach up to get back what was now being dangled above her. “You know it’s not because of them, don’t you? Do you ever pay attention to a word our parents say about me, or do you think that you don’t need to listen?”

“What else could it be?” Severa was still looking at the picture, knowing the two little boys that were at her sister’s sides fairly well due to how often she’d have to accompany Nah to events with them. “You’re just wanting to show off that you have two little boyfriends, aren’t you? That’s why you’ve been carrying this around on a necklace for weeks now.”

“They’re not my boyfriends, look at the other side of the picture.” Jumping to try and reach it, Nah could do nothing but hope that Severa took her request seriously and did as she said, but all she got was the picture being dropped on her face. “Ugh, you think that I’m so annoying that I carry a picture of my friends around just to have a picture of them, don’t you? You really don’t know a thing about me.”

“And honestly? I don’t want to.” It was harsh, but it was Severa’s exact feelings on the matter, and watching Nah storm out of the room was satisfying, just like hearing the other bedroom door slam shut was. She could hear Cordelia downstairs, calling up to ask if everything was okay, but there was no chance she was going to acknowledge that her mother was trying to get her attention so she slammed her own door and waited for whenever her father was home for real.

What she got instead was the sound of sirens outside the house, which wasn’t too abnormal given that they lived along a moderately busy street that led deeper into the neighborhood; usually the sirens got louder and faded out within moments, but this time they stayed loud, almost as if they were sitting right in front of the house. Their high-pitched whine was enough to drown anything else in the house out, so Severa couldn’t hear her mother’s reaction to the sounds, but she _could_ hear what she was certain was something sliding down some of the stairs right outside her bedroom door.

She had to ask herself if she cared enough to check to see what had happened, but then a second noise loud enough to overpower the sirens came through the house, a panicked scream courtesy of her mother. “Okay, what’s going on out there?” she asked herself, opening her bedroom door to see her mother standing halfway up the staircase, the flashing emergency lights reflecting off the walls in the house after entering the highest windows they had. “Um, that’s not good…”

“Severa, it isn’t every day that I ask you for a favor, but I need you to call your father,” Cordelia said, trying to keep her voice as calm as she could despite obviously being bothered. “We seem to have had a little bit of an accident and he needs to be aware of it.”

“Accident?” Severa repeated, coming out of her bedroom and looking down the stairs at her mother, who was standing hunched over what was clearly Nah’s crumpled body. Suddenly what she hadn’t connected the dots about before came to hit her, the reason why her parents coddled Nah so much more than her, the reason why she had some kind of note attached to her at all times, the reason for the blackout curtains on almost every window in the house. “D-did she fall because of the lights?”

“I’m going to assume yes, but there isn’t time for speculating what went wrong. Phone, father, right this instant.” Cordelia’s words were rushed but carried the meaning Severa needed them to, and despite not usually going along with what her mother wanted she felt the urgency of the matter. The only issue was that, in order to get to the closest phone, she had to go down the stairs, passing the girl laying there and the woman trying to get her back to standing. Swallowing down any fear that had begun to build within her, Severa went down the stairs as carefully and quickly as she could, but when she passed where Nah was laying she could feel the girl trembling, her whole body rigid as she shook. It was enough to get her to freeze in place, looking horrified at what was going on.

She’d known this girl since she was an infant, and this was the first time she’d seen her epileptic sister mid-seizure. “Mom, is she going to be okay?” she managed to choke out, but Cordelia was not paying any attention to what she was saying, only trying to keep the situation as controlled as possible. “Please, tell me she’ll be fine, I don’t—”

“Go call your father and tell him we need him home, so that we can both get her through this one. She’ll be fine once she stops seizing, but until then…” Cordelia fell silent as she went back to entirely focusing on the younger girl, and Severa nodded, understanding how important it was that she call her father.

Without looking back at them after she got to the bottom of the stairs, Severa ran to where she knew her mother always kept her phone when she was at home and grabbed it, easily finding her father’s contact information and dialing not his personal number, but rather the number for the office at the orphanage. It went straight to voicemail, which she decided was just a waste of time and she hung up without saying anything, calling his personal phone instead, only to reach the same ending. “Mom, he’s not picking up the phone!” she hollered, hoping her mother would hear her. “I’m gonna send him a message and then what do you want me to do?”

“Call Sumia, she’ll come over and help me until he gets home, I know she’ll be available.” Still sounding worried, Cordelia seemed to have already had the backup plan in mind thankfully, and Severa went right ahead and did as she was told then, finding the new number she needed to call and giving it a shot.

She was answered with a friendly “Hello? Cordelia? What’s the matter, you don’t usually call me when you need me” that had Severa’s heart sinking into her stomach to hear. She wasn’t sure how she was going to word what needed to be said, but she knew that she wasn’t going to be able to do it delicately. Whatever it was that she said, she’d immediately blanked it out of her mind, but she did remember that Sumia said she’d be right over, and that they’d have it all under control soon enough. The last thing she did remember hearing was Sumia’s kind voice telling her not to worry and to stay strong for her sister, and that request lingered in her mind a lot longer than she’d have expected it to.

Instead of telling her mother that the call was successful, Severa decided to try getting through to her father again, knowing that keeping him in the dark about what had happened would be worse than possibly getting in trouble for continuing to make calls without permission. She tried his personal phone again, still getting no answer and going straight to voicemail, and when she checked the message she’d sent about how he needed to come home, she saw that it hadn’t been received yet. “I guess his phone’s off,” she concluded, setting her mother’s phone back where she’d retrieved it from and leaving the area, going to the bottom of the stairs just in time to see her mother getting Nah into her arms, carrying her downstairs to get her somewhere safer. “Are you going to take her to the doctors or something for this?” she asked, getting out of Cordelia’s way as she passed her by.

“Not on my own, she’s breathing and she’ll get back to being herself soon enough, why waste the money on having them evaluate her unless she needs it?” Cradling the small girl in her arms as carefully as she could, Cordelia used her head to motion for Severa to follow her as she carried Nah into the living room, laying her down on the couch in the room that faced away from the front door and windows. Somewhere in the middle of everything the sirens had turned off, but the flashing lights were still visible up through those upper-most windows in the house, which was cause for concern.

Within minutes, there was a knock at the front door that Severa figured she needed to answer, because her mother was still sitting at her sister’s side, stroking her forehead and making sure she was comfortable. “You didn’t explain what happened when you called, so I expected the worst,” Sumia said as she came inside, Severa blinking in surprise at getting pushed past by the woman. That surprise only intensified when she could see that it hadn’t just been Sumia standing there, as there was a friendly face greeting her with a wave.

“I tagged along because Mom thought that maybe you’d get stuck here alone, and she figured that’d be super bad after what happened.” Even in an uncertain moment, Cynthia was a bright presence that Severa enjoyed having around, and the older girl quickly read that there was a lot of confusion and conflicting feelings surrounding what was going on, so she nearly tackled Severa in a hug. “You’ll be fine, and so will Nathalie. It’s not that big of a deal.”

“She was shaking on the stairs, she fell and hit her head, or something like that,” Severa choked out, getting overcome with emotions now that someone was hugging her. “I’ve never seen it happen before, and I was just making fun of her for her card telling people what to do when it happens and…I’m the worst, Cynthia. I’m the actual worst!”

“Hey now, you’re not the worst at all. You’re just a difficult big sister with a little sister who’s got a medical issue, bad timing happens to everyone and it just got you this time.” Breaking the hug apart, Cynthia entered the house and Severa closed the door behind her, still emotionally bothered by what was going on. “You’ve just got to move past it and not blame yourself for anything, okay?”

Deep down inside herself, Severa knew that nothing was her fault and that she had no reason to think that it was but coming to terms with that fact was a lot harder than rejecting blame usually was. “I guess you’re right, but still, I’m gonna blame myself until she’s back to being her normal annoying self. I don’t _like_ her but that doesn’t mean I want to see her suffer, you know? I just want her to not bother me.”

“And that makes total sense, I’m sure if I lived with my brother all the time I’d get to feeling the same way about him.” Cynthia stroked her chin in thought, while Severa stiffened up, her mind moving to thinking about the very brother that had just been mentioned. “Uh, Severa? You okay? You’re starting to look a little red…”

“Don’t tell me my other daughter’s got some kind of issue as well right now,” Cordelia interrupted, not looking in the girls’ direction but still listening in on what they were saying. “Send her up to her room, have her lay down until she feels better. There is only one of me and I can’t focus on both of them at once.”

“Mom, I’m _fine_.” Severa’s response came only after she shook her head rapidly to clear the thoughts that had crossed her mind, huffing deeply after she spoke. “I’ll definitely go up to my room though, me and Cynthia can go talk somewhere that you can’t hear us.”

She turned and made her way up the stairs, Cynthia following right behind her, and once they were at the top and in her bedroom she had to face her friend, who had put together what was going on and was restraining herself from laughing. “You got all flustered there when I mentioned a certain someone, didn’t you?” she teasingly asked, tapping Severa’s nose and watching as she tensed up again. “Oh my gods you did, that’s so adorable!”

“The way you talk about him makes me think about him from when he was small and easy to push around. Now he’s, like, twice our size and could push us around if he wanted to. I’m not ‘flustered’ about him, I’m just…” Realizing she was starting to babble, Severa clenched her mouth shut tightly and glared at Cynthia, her face turning bright red as she did.

“I’m not going to rat you out to him, that’d be super rude. He can figure out that you like him for himself, whenever he decides to get around to that. Oh man though, you’re so lucky that Mom didn’t decide to tell Dad where we were going, he’d have brought him along and then you’d be stuck dealing with both of us.” Cynthia was most definitely amused at the conversation she was having, even if it was in horrible circumstances, but Severa was not enjoying it nearly as much as she was.

This was already a pretty horrible day, getting grounded and then having to be present for one of her sister’s seizures, getting teased for how she felt about someone wasn’t anything she wanted added to it. She was going to have to get her revenge about part of it somehow, but how she wasn’t sure. At any rate, it wasn’t the appropriate time to be plotting out how she’d get back at someone for _liking_ them, not when that said someone’s older sister was in the room with her. “Okay, whatever, he’s better to hang around than either of his stupid friends. What does he see in them, anyway?”

“We aren’t getting into this, Owain’s basically family and I’m not allowed to talk bad about him, and I don’t really know the other kid.” That was the hard limit on what kinds of conversations they could have together—while Cynthia was more than happy to dish out gossip about crushes, she wasn’t going to insult someone she’d known since he was a baby. “I will say that Brady could do to have better friends, but that’s where you come in! You’re, like, the best friend he could ask for, if you ask me!”

“Best friend, huh? I think I could work with that, you’ve just got to give me the chance to make it happen. Got any ideas about when we could do that?” As soon as the question left Severa’s lips, she could see the gears turning in Cynthia’s mind, and when her friend eagerly nodded she was almost scared to ask about when, exactly, she was thinking of.

As it turned out, that day was a lot closer than she’d have imagined, and it would end up being a bit of a slap in the face to one of the people Severa loved hurting most (discounting her family, of course). All she’d have to do was make it through the night, and through the following week, and then it’d be time to put the plan in action.

 


	6. Teacher Workday

At least once a month, the teachers at the school were expected to get together on a day off for the students and do training sessions, a request that was relatively easy to follow as it wasn’t taking out of any of their weekends. With how many of the teachers had children that were close in age to one another, they’d end up planning events for their kids to attend while they were in their training, so that friendships would be forged that went beyond the interactions the students were having in the hallways.

Going to these training sessions had been something Owain accepted for as long as he could remember; there were very few times where he’d been lucky enough to be able to go somewhere else for the day, and all the ones he could recall involved going to hang out with Brady at his mom’s house. That wasn’t an option on this particular day, nor was going and spending another day with Inigo and his family, and since all of the other people he considered friends had at least one teacher parent, he was more or less trapped into going.

“It’s never as bad as you try to make it out to be,” Lucina reminded him, as they and Morgan sat alone in the car, her having driven them both to the school so that all of their parents could ride over together. “You just have to stay positive about it, and try not to be so weird when it comes to talking to others.”

“Always the kindest when you need to remind me that I’m strange and no one likes me,” he replied, opening the door to the car so that he could get out and start towards the meeting spot, which his cousins followed suit in doing. “Let’s go see who else is trapped with us today, I’m sure it’ll be the same kids as always but there’s hope for some change.”

“I wonder if any of _my_ friends will be here,” Morgan said, sounding rather wistful even though he was clearly bouncing at the idea. “I know none of them ever come, but maybe today’s the day! It’s possible, don’t you think?”

Neither Lucina nor Owain wanted to be the one to break it to him that it really wasn’t possible, but someone had to do it. “Er, only the kids of teachers come to these, and none of your friends have teacher parents so they don’t have to be here. Sorry, but maybe you can work on also not being so weird when talking to the others.” Lucina grabbed for her brother’s hand so that he couldn’t bolt off and adventure on his own, but he was already running ahead and causing for her to pick up her pace to keep up with him. “Get back here, Morgan! You don’t know where we’re going, do you?”

“I can make a guess!” he called at her in reply, many steps ahead of her, and even further ahead of Owain. Normally, he’d be all over staying in-step with Morgan, but the thought of having to endure this day of socializing with others his age that weren’t his friends was beginning to eat at him. All week he’d been dreading the day that everyone else got to hang around at home and get a break from school, while he was forced out to some park where the adults were doing training in one of the rentable buildings. It hadn’t helped matters that his friends had talked about their plans for the day, about how they were going to catch up on things school kept them from doing, like spend time with their parents, and the only person he’d heard talk about being in the same place as him was someone he did not get along with.

It happened to be that very person that they came across first, sitting cross-legged in the grass at the edge of the park. “Are you the only one here so far, Laurent?” Lucina asked, beginning to sit down next to him before he raised a hand to her, shaking a finger. “Uh, what is that supposed to mean?”

“I am not the only one here, but I would request that you do not sit near me if you’re watching your brother. There is something rather important I promised someone I would do today, and his presence will only distract from it.” His words were cryptic, but that was typically how Laurent worked. He wasn’t all that much older than Owain was, but sometimes it was like they were from entirely different worlds.

Lucina wasn’t sure how she was supposed to take what she’d just heard, and she looked at Owain with a questioning glance. “So I need to actually talk to Laurent, mind if you take Morgan for a walk around the park or something while I do that?” she asked him, which he wasn’t going to refuse simply because he knew that when his cousin wanted to do something, she was going to find a way to do it through sheer determination. Laurent seemed to be surprised that Lucina had something to discuss with him, but he only showed it by pushing his glasses up on his face and turning to her, not saying a word.

“Yeah, I suppose we could go for a walk, can’t promise it’ll be long but it should be enough, maybe?” In all honesty, Owain was fine with taking control of Morgan for a bit, if it meant that he could get away from Laurent. It wasn’t that they hated each other, but rather that they’d been forced into so many attempts at friendship when they were younger, despite being nothing alike, that they could barely stand to be near each other without getting on the other’s nerves. “Come on, Morgan, we can go try to chase bugs if you want.”

“I always want to chase bugs, even if I don’t end up catching them.” Breaking away from everyone as fast as he could, Morgan skidded to a stop and turned completely around to see how far ahead of Owain he’d gotten, laughing as he watched his cousin walk up behind him, shaking his head with every step. “Are you okay? Normally you’d be running with me, did I do something wrong to make you not wanna?”

Biting his tongue, Owain shook his head again and said nothing, not wanting to explain his muddled thoughts to his younger cousin. Morgan shrugged it off, running off into the distance again, and that ended up being how their “walk” went, him charging off and then waiting to get caught back up with. As they rounded the outer edge of the park, close to the parking lot that the teachers were all parking in, they could see more people gathered over there than were still in the field (looking back to where Lucina and Laurent were showed that they remained the only two others out there). “Where is everyone else, usually by now there’s at least a couple others,” Owain said under his breath, not wanting to walk back to the other two without someone else joining them. “Do you think everyone else found somewhere better to be?”

“I think we just got here super early,” Morgan answered, catching Owain by surprise as he hadn’t been talking to be heard. “It’s okay, we’ll have more people show up and then we’ll be able to play games or tag or something fun! Can we go chase bugs now, that’s what you said we’d do when we went on our walk.”

“I did, didn’t I?” Owain’s attention was still on the crowd of teachers, eyes narrowing as he tried seeing who else may or may not have been present within it. It was usual for a student or two joining everyone to come over with their parents and then join the rest of the kids, rather than ride over as a car of only students, but when he saw someone who was clearly an adult heading their way, he sighed. “I think we should go do that now, before we get told to go play nice with someone else by their dad.”

“Someone’s dad is coming?” Now Morgan was looking in the same direction that Owain was, seeing the tall, intimidating man coming their way, but he looked right past him and started bouncing in excitement. “I see someone else coming too, but that’s not her dad that she’s with. Owain, we’ve gotta wait for her to get here!”

Trying to see who Morgan was referring to, Owain had to ask who it was when all he could see from his particular angle was the man. The name his cousin gave him as an answer for who it was made him relax a bit, as he was expecting the worst and ended up getting something a little less horrifying. “That explains why she’s with Laurent’s dad, then. We should still go catch bugs now, the last thing we need is for either of them to drag us into whatever it is Laurent’s planning on doing.”

“Sounds good! But you’ve gotta race me around if we’re going!” Without waiting for Owain to say anything, Morgan shot off into the distance, stopping once he was at the furthest edge of the park and waving his arms wildly for his cousin to follow him. Owain kept watching the man and the girl with him as they approached for a few moments, but when he saw the man give a friendly gesture towards him to acknowledge that he’d been seen, he decided that it was then time to get back to what he was supposed to be doing with Morgan. Going as fast as he could will himself to, he caught up relatively quickly, to see Morgan dive down into the grass with outstretched arms, trying to catch something that had caught his eye.

“You’re going to stain your clothes and I’ll be blamed for letting it happen,” Owain grumbled as Morgan picked himself back up, evidence of sliding in the grass noticeable on his shirt, but the younger boy didn’t seem to mind. In fact, based on how he jumped right back into the grass, followed immediately by a large grasshopper leaping out of his reach, it was clear that he didn’t mind getting dirty at all, even if Owain minded. “You’ve got to at least try to not get so dirty, I know we’ll never hear the end of it from Lucy or from your parents if you look like you’ve been rolling around in the grass.”

“It’s not rolling around, it’s bug hunting, and they all know I do it. They’ll clean my clothes like they always do, it’s no big deal.” This went on for a couple repetitions, time during which Owain had gotten down on his knees to be sitting down while able to get back to his feet as fast as possible if needed. Getting up once more, Morgan looked around for the bug that now had gotten away and froze in place when he looked back in the direction they’d come from. “Hey, Owain, it’s not a big deal if we’ve got someone with us, is it?”

“Depends, are they a someone we know?” He wasn’t aware of what his cousin had seen, and was instead looking out towards where Lucina and Laurent were still sitting, having been joined by a couple other people who were standing up around them. Before Morgan had a chance to reply to him, thick arms wrapped their way around Owain’s upper body, causing his heart to nearly skip a beat in fear of what had just grabbed him. “H-help! Someone’s trying to kill me, Morgan! Get your sister!”

Morgan started to laugh at Owain’s behavior, having let the person he’d been talking about walk right past him to cause this to happen, and the girl who’d grabbed Owain was trying to hardest to keep a straight face. “I’m not trying to kill you, you jerk, I’m just not used to being able to sneak up on someone like this.”

He had to take a few deep breaths to come down from his terrified state, and while he was doing that she’d let go of him and had walked around to standing in front of him, her hands on her hips as she maintained her mostly-neutral expression. “Oh, what happened to you following along with Laurent’s dad? Didn’t think you’d come over here to see us, I thought you’d go right to being with the others.”

“I’ve been stuck with Laurent and mister Gregor since sunrise today, I do _not_ want to go back to being lectured on stupid stuff.” He gave her an apologetic glance, sorry that he’d made the wrong assumption about what she’d have wanted, but she looked right past it, stomping forward until she was right up against him. “No, don’t look at me like that, that’s dumb for you to do. You’re just trying to get rid of me, aren’t you?”

He shook his head, wanting to push her away but knowing that even laying a finger on her would result in her trying to snap his arm. “I would never in a million years try to get rid of you, Kjelle. We’ve known each other…how long now? Since you were a baby? You’re more like a sister than a friend, I couldn’t imagine wanting to…push you…away…?”

Those last words were said as she raised a curled fist towards his face, causing more fear to crop up within him than he’d known was possible in such a situation. “You’re just saying that because you know my mom can kick your dad into next week if she finds out you’re bullying me,” she told him, before dropping her fist back to her hip. “But you’re not actually bullying me and I _guess_ I shouldn’t be telling lies about you just to see our parents fight.”

“You’d tell lies to make that happen?” Owain asked, swallowing down all his fear now that the threat seemed to be gone. “Isn’t that, you know, kind of rude?”

“Well, yeah, it’s rude, but I tell my mom all the time when people decide they’re going to try bullying me, only ‘cause she doesn’t want me getting into fights for myself yet.” There was something about how Kjelle was speaking, her matter-of-fact tone and her almost-smile on her lips, that was making Owain aware of how serious she was about her words. “Once I’m older and actually scary to face in a fight like she is, that’s when people will learn to stop trying to bully me.”

“I think you’d be super scary to face in a fight right now,” Morgan said, not understanding that he should have been keeping his mouth shut. Owain could hear his footsteps in the grass, until he was standing beside him, hands clasped together in front of him and a gleeful look on his face. “But if we were gonna fight right now, I’d win because I’ve got a bug with me and you’re just a f—”

“Morgan, don’t finish that thought.” Owain had started to get the sinking feeling that Morgan was about to put his foot in his mouth and start an actual fight right there, but he hadn’t expected him to almost drop a word that he knew the third person with them was not fond of hearing. “Why don’t you let the bug go, and we can head back over to where Lucy is? I don’t think Kjelle would really want to hunt bugs with us.”

“No, let him finish what he was going to say.” That was what he’d been worried about, Kjelle catching onto where Morgan was going. “He wasn’t about to call me names, was he?”

“Uh, no, he wasn’t, you know that Morgan doesn’t know what he’s saying most of the time.” Standing up, Owain tried to position himself between the two so that a fight didn’t start, but all that resulted was Morgan throwing the grasshopper he’d caught onto his back, and in the panic of trying to get it off of himself he stumbled over his own feet and fell straight into Kjelle, who wasn’t prepared for him hitting her and they both ended up hitting the grass. After a moment of stunned silence trying to make sense of what had just happened, he was picking himself up off of her and trying to help her to her feet, seeing murder in her eyes. “Hey now, it was an accident, I didn’t mean to fall onto you.”

She had accepted his offered hands and was trying to use him to get back up, but it was requiring a lot more force than he was able to put in with one of his arms, and she was growing frustrated with him. “I know you didn’t mean to, but how perfect is it that you fall onto me instead of your bony cousin?”

“I really wasn’t meaning to fall on you, if Morgan had been standing there I would’ve fallen into him instead. Don’t think that I chose to do this or something.” The frustration was evident within her expression, as was that lingering anger that had him scared for what was going to happen. “Please, Kjelle, listen to me! It was a huge accident and I didn’t mean to do it! You’re gonna go tell your mom on me and I’m going to get in trouble for this, and you won’t care that I didn’t mean to do it!”

She thought for a couple seconds about what he was saying, before pulling him back down onto the ground with all her might, laughing once he was in the grass. “I know you didn’t mean it, Owain, you’re not a jerk, but now we’re completely even about everything.”

“Should I go get Lucy after all?” Morgan asked, watching what the two were doing and trying to think of the best way to handle things without getting directly involved. He wasn’t given an answer, but rather a hand reaching over and grabbing his leg, making him scream. “Let go of me! Are you trying to make me fall? I’d get hurt if I fell down ‘cause of a big, huge bully like you, Kjelle!”

“I’m the bully here now?” she replied, letting go of him and watching as he ran a couple steps away, looking very bothered by the fact that she’d touched him to begin with. “You’re the one who made Owain fall into me, and you’re here calling me names _and_ a bully? Who taught you your manners, huh?”

His lower lip jutted out and he loudly sniffled before starting to cry, although it was clearly faked. “I am gonna go get Lucy, and she’s gonna put you in your place! You can’t be mean to me just because you wanna be!” And with that he was running off, feet faster than anything as he went back to the other side of the field where his sister and the others were still sitting.

“We should probably follow him to make sure that he doesn’t get both of us in trouble about this, even though neither of us did anything wrong,” Owain said, as he got himself back on his feet. Nodding in agreement, Kjelle did the same, without even trying to use his still-offered hand as support. “I think he got too excited about having someone kinda close to his age around for the moment, he forgot how to act.”

“He didn’t really bother me, calling me a bully like he did,” she admitted, brushing grass off her back and forcing a chuckle. “It was…something else he’d almost said that was getting to me, but it’s not like I don’t hear it enough from every other person I talk to, so it didn’t bother me a whole lot.”

“I’m not gonna make excuses for him but what he was trying to say was not called for, not when you’re such a great friend to us.” They were walking back now, taking their time crossing the field despite needing to get back quicker to do damage control for whatever Morgan was going to say. “I don’t think it’s clicked in his mind that making fun of you is just like making fun of his other friends, and he knows better than to do that to them so he shouldn’t do it to you either.”

Even though they were walking slowly, she still managed to slow their pace down further as Owain’s words sank in; this was only temporary, until the point that Morgan just didn’t seem to know better hit her. “You think he’s that dumb to not get it? Yeah, sure, I’m not one of his school friends but that doesn’t mean he should treat me differently because of it.”

“Kjelle, you’re saying this as someone who…” Owain’s thought trailed off as he stopped walking entirely, waiting for her to catch back up with him, her head tilted as she waited for him to continue what he was saying. “As someone who hates the only other kid you’ve grown up with that’s your age.”

“So, what of it? I’ve got good reason to hate him, my parents even say so.” They were standing still in the middle of the field, just out of earshot of the rest of the group but definitely within their line of sight, and if anyone had wanted to come join them then they could have. He didn’t want to be having this particular conversation that he’d started them on, but he wanted her to realize how strange it was for her to expect Morgan to treat her with respect but refused to respect someone else that she knew, although he was not the person to be trying to make her understand that. “Are we going to keep walking or not? I’m sure everyone’s been watching us and I don’t want…don’t need them making jokes when we get over there.”

He didn’t respond, so she rolled her eyes and kept moving forward, shaking her head and muttering something as she went. His feet started in her direction a moment later, going nowhere fast but still going as he watched her get away from him. “I just don’t get her sometimes,” he said to himself, bringing his bad arm in front of him to stretch the fingers on it (as they’d stiffened up in the time since he’d tried using that hand to help her back to her feet). “Maybe it’s because she’s younger than me? Or maybe because she’s a girl? I don’t know, but she just doesn’t make sense.”

Even though he was following her to get back to everyone, he was making sure that he wouldn’t ever be heard by anyone as he verbally sorted things out. “If she’s got a problem with Morgan she really should fix it, but we’ve seen how she’s tried ‘fixing’ her problems with others before and it usually ends with someone getting punched. But _what’s_ her problem with Morgan, really? He didn’t actually say anything that would upset her.” In his mind, he was aware that dancing around the word Morgan had almost used to refer to her was just as bad as outright saying it, but the boy wasn’t skilled in ignoring the obvious and making no reference to it at all.

Maybe in time he’d get better at it, but as it stood he was going to get himself hurt by being so blunt when it came to talking to Kjelle in particular. Owain was aware this wasn’t even the first time that they’d come this close to a fight breaking out between the two of them, and the reason for every other incident had stemmed from the exact same issue this one had: Morgan being so unaware of how to avoid an issue that he’d almost directly brought up Kjelle’s one insecurity to her face. Now that she wasn’t around to remind him that even thinking of her in such a way was a dangerous activity, he felt comfortable reminding himself that he’d just gotten really good at looking at her and just seeing her for who she was, not how she looked.

He sighed, glancing in the last direction he’d seen her in and noticing that she’d stopped walking and was now sitting in the grass with everyone else, her short hair so different compared to the long hair all the other girls had. That wasn’t the thing she was insecure about and he knew it, and he was sure that if he told her that was the only difference he could pick out at that distance she’d be happy to hear it. “I wonder if she’ll start a fight with any of them if they say something wrong,” he remarked, deciding to pick up his pace because telling her that positive thing he’d realized felt important to him. “I mean, I don’t think a bunch of high school kids who actually _like_ her are going to sit there and call her names to her face, but…”

The decision to bully someone was far too difficult for Owain to even try making, especially not when it involved someone he’d grown up with, so he let the thought disappear and hoped for the best. His intentions were great, but he was prevented from doing what he wanted to when he made his approach and Lucina was the one who stopped him from getting any closed, arms outstretched with one hand pointed in the direction of the parking lot. “I’ve been asked to keep you from getting any closer at the moment, sorry Owain,” she said, shaking her pointed hand to try to coerce him to follow its directions. “They’re doing something that I guess Laurent really wanted to get done with Kjelle today.”

“R-right, they’re friends too,” he said with a hushed voice, all the pride he’d started to build for trying to be a good person collapsing immediately. “I was just going to tell her that I’d noticed something about her when I was walking back, and I thought she’d like to hear it.”

“That’s a nice thought, but leave it for later. We’ve got a pretty big group here today, we need to start doing something before more people wander off like you and Morgan had.” She was ignoring the fact that it had been at her insistence that they’d gone for their own walk in the first place, but Lucina wasn’t going to make them a special case when she had so many people to be worrying about. “Speaking of him, what happened over on the other side of the field? He told me some troubling things.”

Opening his mouth to speak, Owain stopped himself before the first word could be said and shook his head rapidly. “We have to talk about it somewhere that isn’t here, I can’t do it where she might hear me say it.” Even though he knew he wouldn’t be attacked if he was just recounting what had happened, he wanted to at least be courteous enough to his friend to not repeat things she’d rather not hear while she could hear them. Lucina seemed to have expected that reaction, as she led him back over towards the car, not quite reaching the parking lot before she turned on her heels and faced him directly, waiting for him to talk. “Okay, uh, what did Morgan say happened?”

Lucina sized him up before giving him the explanation he was looking for. “He said that you body-slammed Kjelle into the ground and hurt her, but judging by how you’ve got no black eye or broken bones and she didn’t seem to be ‘hurt’ at all when she came over, I doubt that’s what happened.”

“Me falling into her was his fault, he threw a bug on my back and I lost my balance trying to get it off. Then she pulled me down into her a second time after that to be funny, but it wasn’t anything close to a body slam, I promise.” Of course that had been all that Morgan had told his sister about what had gone on while they were on the other side of the field, he most likely hadn’t even noticed that what he’d done had been taken as rude. “Seems like he didn’t tell you that he started calling her names then, did he?”

“Why would he? He knows I’ll go straight to our parents and have them remind him why that’s not appropriate.” Lucina pursed her lips together in disappointment, looking towards the group of students that had gathered for the day as she tried to find Morgan within it. “What did he call her, by chance? Was it something he shouldn’t have been saying? I’ve heard Mother talking about how she’s caught wind of children his age using vulgar language they shouldn’t be using before.”

Giving his head a quick shake, Owain was more than happy to at least partially destroy Lucina’s fears on the matter. “No, it wasn’t anything _bad_ , it was just, uh, rude that he said it? ‘Big, huge bully’ was something he’d thrown around—” he could hear Lucina give a small laugh at the term, in all its child-like glory, and that frustrated him, “—no you don’t get it, do you? She hates that, she hates being called things like that.”

“Maybe if she wasn’t a bully she wouldn’t be referred to as such.”

“That’s not the part of it that bothers her, Lucy, and you know it.” He hated talking back to his cousin when she was trying to be mature and in control of a situation, but Owain wanted to make sure that she knew she wasn’t seeing things right. “She enjoys being intimidating and mean when she needs to be, I mean, she’s just as scary as her mom is and that’s just how she is. It’s the _other_ words he used that bothered her.”

“Owain, I don’t know how to tell you this without offending you, but I know that. I’ve known since she was little and I’d be in charge of watching her for a few minutes that she doesn’t like having her size pointed out to her.” Lucina was starting to fidget with her hair, twisting a long strand of it around her finger as she thought of how to approach what she needed to say, while Owain stared at her, not sure how he was supposed to take what he was hearing. How had she just been criticizing the bully part of what had been said when she clearly knew the real issue? “It’s the one thing she’s insecure about, and it happens to not be something tiny she could ignore.”

He could see her cracking a smile at him, while his brows were beginning to furrow. “Okay, but seriously? You’re going to say that Morgan shouldn’t have called her a bully, even though that was the least offensive part of what he’d said to her?”

“If anything, teasing by someone a couple years younger than her might be the motivation she needs to do something about it.” A pause, while Lucina looked back to where she saw Kjelle and Laurent sitting, in the middle of some conversation that had driven everyone else away from them. “Of course, that does require her taking a page out of her mother’s book and not the one she seems to end up following. Perhaps I should be the one to pull her away from him and set her straight?”

“I…don’t think you should,” Owain said, also looking at the two and trying his hardest not to scowl in Laurent’s direction. “If you take her from him, he’ll go after someone else to do his stupid nerd business and I’m sorry Lucy but I’m not being that sacrifice today.” No matter how much he was fond of Kjelle’s company, he wasn’t going to aid his cousin in making her happier if it meant being stuck listening to Laurent explain something to him. “Maybe you could talk to her some other time about it, but not now.”

“You’re right, I need to remind Morgan that no matter how much he wants to, he’s not allowed to pick on people for things that aren’t fully in their control.” Their talk seemed to have reached its conclusion, Lucina starting to head towards the group of students that was gathered there for the day, but she called over her shoulder to get Owain’s attention one last time before she was gone: “You can join us whenever you’re ready to be part of the day’s events, but I don’t expect you to come right away. Take your time, okay?”

Even though he knew she wasn’t going to see it, he gave her a salute in understanding as he said, “You got it, I’ll be there when I’m ready.” Watching her walk away felt weird, because he knew that he was supposed to be part of what everyone else was doing, but the fact that Lucina knew him well enough to know that he’d not be paying attention if he joined right then made his heart swell. There was something that their conversation had made him realize, and he wasn’t going to rest until he’d explored it fully.

That was, naturally, the idea that most of the people he was close with were flawed in some manner. He had his issues with his arm, Morgan was unable to focus on or filter out anything whenever he started doing something, Lucina seemed to be pretty normal but she had her moments of being oblivious to jokes or finding the wrong things funny. It extended to his friends as well—Brady had his whole weird family, as well as the fact that he was awkward and had gone from tiny kid to grown-up boy over the summer, and Inigo was unable to control himself around any woman but wasn’t able to make good on anything he said. They’d just dealt with Kjelle’s whole issue, and she herself was dealing with Laurent’s insistence on showing people around him things as he saw them, and if Owain was counting him in the list then he had to add Severa and her nasty attitude and behavior towards everyone as well.

Was there anyone he knew that didn’t have some kind of somewhat-major flaw to them? He wasn’t going to stand there and list off everyone that he’d ever known, trying to find someone that might not have existed in the first place, but he was going to try his best to look past all those flaws and accept the people as they were. If everyone could look at him and not see him as a spacey kid with an arm that didn’t always work, he could look at everyone else and see them as something that wasn’t their personal flaws. “I wonder how long I’ll be able to keep this up before someone tells me I’m being a jerk or ignoring what makes them special,” he remarked, starting to go in the direction Lucina had gone in before him, ready to catch up to what all was going on. “If anyone’s gonna do that, it’ll be Severa, but why do I care what she says? She’s the _real_ bully in all of this.”

He was completely unaware that when he got to the group of students, he’d be coming face-to-face with her, as she stood right at Cynthia’s side, arms interlocked as if they’d just been frolicking through the field together or something. Her expression soured when he came into view, and when he’d realized it was her he found himself wishing he’d gone to stand somewhere else. “Ew, who let you join us?” she loudly asked, nudging Cynthia with her elbow. “Look, it’s little Owain, how lame, right?”

“Severa, I told you he’d be here when we were on our way here, remember? It was one of the things you had to accept before I’d let you come with me.” Grinning at Owain even though she was having to remind her friend that she needed to place nice, Cynthia opened up her other arm for him to take. “Come on, I’ve got two arms for a reason! We can all be friends together!”

He shook his head in rejection of the offer, although he was sure that if he’d taken it up he could’ve bragged to Inigo for weeks about it. “Why’s she here? Neither of her parents work at the school so she doesn’t need to be here today.”

“She’s had a rough week at home and I told her I’d keep her from being stuck there today,” Cynthia replied, speaking before Severa had the chance to. “It’s what a good upperclassman does for her freshman friend, you know? Have to support her whenever I can.”

“And that means being here even though I don’t have to be,” Severa added, sticking her tongue out at Owain. “So you can, like, go do something else and leave us alone. We don’t need you around dragging us down.”

He didn’t want to have to find somewhere else to stand, as he was usually pretty comfortable with just hanging around Cynthia at these events, but if Severa was there he wanted no part of it. “I’ll find someone else to spend today with, it’s all good,” he said, backing away and nearly knocking into whoever it was standing behind him. He turned around and left the group, getting to where he could look and see where everyone else was just in case there was anyone else he’d be interested in spending the time with, that wasn’t either of his cousins. There was, naturally, the opportunity to go sit with Laurent and Kjelle, but he wasn’t that desperate for companionship and still had no desire to be talked down to like he would be with them, but other than them…

He had to do a double-take when he saw some tall boy that looked very familiar, because he was certain that the person he saw shouldn’t have been there—but just like with Severa he was sure that they’d gotten roped into coming by Cynthia as well. Now he had to dodge and avoid contact with everyone else to get to that boy’s side, grabbing his arm once he got to him and hearing the deep scream that the contact caused. “Brady! Aren’t you supposed to be with your mom today?”

“Ma ain’t home right now and I wasn’t gonna stay there by myself, so I asked my sister if I could come with her, but she forgot to tell me she was already bringin’ along Severa so I kinda got pushed away.” He gestured to how he was on the outside of the group, more watching everyone else than listening to what their leader was trying to tell them. “Better than bein’ at home alone, but I wish I’d known that it was gonna be like this.”

“Well you’re in luck, since normally _I_ spend these days around your sister and now that she’s buddy-buddy with Severa I’m not bothering with it. We can just hang out like usual, maybe take part in whatever it is Lucy’s going to try to get us to do, and have fun together. You know, like best friends do?” Owain raised a fist for Brady to hit with his own, and after some hesitation he went through with the gesture. “That’s the spirit! Come on, let’s see if we can get away from everyone to do our own thing, huh?”

Nodding slowly, Brady was ready to follow Owain’s lead no matter where it meant they were going; that led them to sneaking behind the group together, a difficult feat given that Brady was easily one of the tallest people there and Owain was one of the loudest. Once they’d successfully made it past everyone without anyone noticing (especially Lucina, who would have called them out for ditching the group activities if given the chance), they came to the plan of going out to the parking lot and just kicking back out there.

However, there were two obstacles sitting in their way between the school event and freedom, and they were both staring in their direction, one unamused and the other looking quite angry. While Owain was thinking more about their escape than anything else, Brady happened to look in the direction of the two people, seeing their expressions and gulping loudly. “Uh, Owain, don’t mean to break ya from whatever thinkin’ you’re doing, but I think some people caught onto us.”

“Some people?” Bringing himself back to reality real quick, Owain’s first action was to look towards Lucina and the group, not seeing anything that he should have been concerned with. Before he could comment on how Brady must have been making something up, he had a hand reach under his chin and wrench his head to turn it the other way, right as he heard the sound of running footsteps in the grass. “Wait, what’s going—”

That hand was forcefully pulled off of him as Brady was knocked to the ground by a charging Kjelle, who seemed to be furious just for seeing him. “I explained to her that she needed to keep her emotions in check once she saw him, but there was no calming that anger once it built,” Laurent said, smugness in his voice as he approached them, he and Owain both watching how Kjelle had positioned herself on top of Brady, preventing him from being able to move. “It’s a shame, Owain, your friend seems to be rather bright, but according to Kjelle he’s quite the despicable being.”

“You’re going to believe how she sees him over actually getting to know him yourself? That’s kind of a low blow, dude.” It wasn’t even the lowest blow that he’d just witnessed, but Owain wasn’t going to make matters worse by talking bad about someone that he genuinely liked as a friend. “We’ve got to get her off of him, before she breaks him or something.”

“No need, there’s little chance she’ll hurt him in this situation. If it were either of us she had pinned to the ground, we’d be in trouble, but him? His size should prevent him from being injured as long as he cooperates with her.” To follow up, Laurent added something else in a language that Owain didn’t understand, but whatever it was he’d said Kjelle laughed at it and replied in a similar manner, looking up at her friend and winking at him. “She doesn’t intend on fighting him right now, not with so many onlookers, so don’t be alarmed.”

“Onlookers?” Owain repeated, before he realized that the body slam hadn’t been a silent affair and had caught the attention of everyone who’d been listening to Lucina talk. Now there was zero chance of getting away from the group, and there was also going to be a lot of discussion about how he shouldn’t have been getting involved in such pointless drama when people could see it, because he was impacting his cousin’s image with everything he did.

The rest of the day ended up being spent exactly as he didn’t want it to be: stuck with Laurent because the two of them were so close in age and knew each other as well as they did (even if they couldn’t particularly stand each other). It was a punishment for someone whose only actual bit of wrongdoing was wanting to leave the group for a while, which made it sting worse because Brady got stuck with Cynthia and Severa, and they actually seemed to make the best of their time together. While they were having fun, Owain was having to talk about homework and projects and things he wasn’t remotely interested in, with no escape unless he wanted to admit he’d done something wrong, which he hadn’t.

Because of that, Owain almost considered begging his cousin to let him ride home with his parents that day, but he stopped himself at the last second because he knew that would end up being an even worse punishment. He could survive listening to Laurent’s nerdy discussions, but any time spent with his parents did not have as much of a guaranteed chance of survival. At least the ride home was an opportunity for the three to promise that they didn’t tell anyone a word of what happened that day, between the fighting and the troublemaking, but like all promises there was no way to be sure it’d be kept.

Especially when someone who _should_ have been in on the promise was getting dropped off at their own house, ready to tell their mother all about what had happened on their extra day with schoolmates.


	7. One Terrible Family

It wasn’t so much that Brady wasn’t capable of keeping secrets as it was that he had a knack for always telling his mother exactly what had been going on, whenever possible, even if he didn’t intend to. When he got home that day he saw that he was still going to be there alone, which wasn’t too unusual given his mother’s line of work, but at the time of day he was getting dropped off at, there was typically someone there to let him in with a smile and a question of how his day had been. “I don’t have my key to get in,” he said upon checking the front door to the house and finding it locked. “I didn’t think I’d need it, now what am I gonna do about bein’ here? I don’t know when Ma will be home, and—”

He was cut off by a car horn, followed by someone shutting their vehicle off right in front of the house. Without even looking at who it was that had shown up, he waited there by the door until he was joined by a boy half his size, who seemed to be itching to get inside but kept trying the doorknob without realizing that it was locked. “Look who’s joining us this weekend,” an older male voice said, definitely not belonging to the boy there next to Brady. “Sorry I wasn’t here when you got home, his mother called and asked if we could watch him this weekend but I had to get him from her.”

“I haven’t been here that long, no worries,” Brady replied, still watching the boy. “Why didn’t ya give him the keys, he’d have us inside already at this point.” He wasn’t given an answer, but in order to help speed the process along he tapped the boy on the shoulder and waved for him to come closer to him, the boy doing so without saying anything. “There ya go, Ricken, now ya can let us all in.”

“Thanks for that, Brady, really appreciate it.” Coming up into the now-crowded entryway of the house, Ricken fiddled with his keys for a moment before unlocking the door, pushing it open but holding an arm out to keep both boys from going in, turning his head to look down at the smaller boy as he spoke. “Which one of you wants to help me get the bags out of the car? I only need one of you to help, there isn’t much to get.”

He was met with silence, as the two boys didn’t say anything, so he repeated the question and waited a moment, just for the smaller boy to sign something that Brady couldn’t see (or understand, he knew a handful of signs and that was it). “That’s fair, it has been a while since you were last allowed to be here. Looks like you’ll be the one helping me, if that’s okay, Brady. Yarne wants to go make sure we didn’t move his room around on him.”

“Yeah, that’s fine, wasn’t really expectin’ him to say that he’d help you get his things anyway.” The arm was lifted and Yarne bolted into the house, turning around once inside and giving a thank you before disappearing down to where his room had always been, at least for as long as he’d had a room at the house. “I knew what that one meant, he just thanked me for bein’ fine with helping. I’m gettin' pretty good at recognizing some of the more basic things he says.”

“According to his mother, he’s gotten to the point where he can speak a little, but he doesn’t do it around anyone who might be impressed by it.” They were walking back towards the car, sitting out in the street in front of the house, and once they got to it Ricken opened the trunk and grabbed out everything that wasn’t clearly a suitcase of belongings from a child. “Now do you see why I needed help, I might’ve done some shopping before getting Yarne, just so his mother couldn’t complain that I was bringing him somewhere without food.”

While he was getting Yarne’s bag from the trunk, closing it once he had it in his hands, Brady thought for a moment about how bad his life would have been if his father was so controlling over his life with his mother, but discussing the quality of life with a controlling mother would be impossible for him to do with Yarne. If he wanted the conversation, he’d have to have it with his stepfather, just like he currently was. “I don’t know why she’d think we don’t have food here, it’s not like you and Ma try starvin’ me when I’m here, so why would you starve him?”

“I don’t think she actually thinks it, but she—but it’s—there’s a lot that has to happen for me to get the chance to spend time with him, and if it’s not all done perfectly then she thinks I’m trying to cause harm to him. This is how it’s been since he was born, it isn’t a new thing.” Hearing these heavier topics coming from someone who, despite being a grown adult, looked much more like he was still in his early-twenties at most, was a bit hard to handle for Brady, but he’d spent a lot of the past few years listening in on conversations about this exact issue so he wasn’t a stranger to it. In fact, if there was anything he’d taken away from everything he knew, it was that he was a prime example of the best-case scenario when there was a child shared between two parents that weren’t together.

On the opposite side of the spectrum was Yarne, who was one of the biggest reasons for why Brady had a stepfather in the first place. It was a story he’d watched unfold before his eyes, his mother offering to marry Ricken so that he could say that he deserved being able to watch his child sometimes now that he was married. Somehow, despite the marriage between lifelong friends being done not out of love but rather out of convenience, the arrangement worked and so Yarne was allowed to come spend time with them roughly once a month, sometimes more than that if his mother had things she wanted to do that toting her deaf child to would complicate.

“Your mother isn’t aware that we have him here this weekend, so don’t be surprised if she comes home and freaks out a little about having both of you with us,” Ricken told him as they went inside the house with everything that they’d grabbed from the car. “I’d tell her, but I know dragging her away from her work for something like this would just result in a bigger freak-out, so we’re just going to let this be our secret for now, okay?”

Brady nodded, rather used to having to see his mother lose her mind over things because no one wanted to tell her about them while she was busy. “And after that, I’ve got somethin’ I need to tell her about that happened today,” he said, knowing he’d be able to leave it at that and not have to elaborate until he was ready, because Ricken respected boundaries and knew that forcing Brady to tell him something wouldn’t get him anywhere.

“You’ll know when she gets home, I’m sure. Why don’t you go hang out with Yarne in the meantime, I bet he’d be thrilled for you to interact with him so soon after him getting here. I don’t know what his life’s like at his mother’s house, it’s not like anyone tells me anything about it, but I’m sure he doesn’t have good relationships with anyone there.” Ricken was already putting away the groceries he’d bought, and his suggestion did give Brady an excuse to go drop Yarne’s bag off in his room, so he decided to just go through with it anyway.

The room was right across from Brady’s own, the door that was usually shut tightly wide open for the first time in a long time. Laying on the floor, surrounded in a small army’s worth of stuffed animals, was Yarne, with his eyes closed and a big smile on his face. Since he wasn’t looking for anyone coming in, Brady had to hope that he would feel the shifting of the floor or something to get his attention, otherwise he would have to touch him to make him notice he wasn’t alone any longer. He set the bag down next to the bed and stood awkwardly next to it, waiting to see if Yarne was going to do anything on his own or if he was going to have to take action himself, and watching the younger boy lay there almost completely still was concerning because he didn’t know if something was wrong or not.

That was when the hand signs started, making words with fingers and motions that Brady wasn’t able to understand, but when the movement stopped Yarne sat up and looked at him, an eager expression on his face. “I’m sorry, I don’t really speak signs, it’s just not somethin’ I’ve gotten to learn. Do ya think it’s possible to do it again? Or maybe just show me what ya mean without signing it?”

Yarne was watching Brady’s lips as he spoke and shook his head when he’d fully comprehended what had been said to him. He signed something else, before grabbing one of the stuffed animals he was sitting with and throwing it at Brady. “Do ya want me to play with you, is that it?” he asked, trying to put as much effort into understanding what was going on as Yarne had to. “Because I will, your dad asked me to hang out with you and if that’s what you want, that’s what you get.”

He sat down on the floor next to Yarne, who was nodding eagerly to see him get so close to him, and for the next bit of time the two of them were playing with the animals, organizing them in rows only for Yarne to always knock them away and start over with them. It was silent aside from the sounds attached to them moving animals, which felt strange but was relatively normal for whenever anyone was doing anything with this boy. After all, if Brady couldn’t guarantee that Yarne was able to see his lips, he wasn’t going to try talking to him, and he couldn’t sign worth anything to communicate that way. But he was fine with the silence, it meant that his brother was happy and if that was the case, then everyone else in the house would be happy as well.

They must have lost track of how long they were playing together, because the first thing to pull Brady out of it was the sound of someone knocking on the door, followed immediately by a pair of hands grabbing his face and turning it so someone could kiss him on the cheek. “What a lovely sight, to see you boys doing something together! I’m glad that you’ve been able to make the best of his surprise visit already, Brady dearest, because if you weren’t here I don’t know how we’d handle this!”

“Hi Ma, glad to know you’re home,” Brady replied, trying to get out of his mother’s grasp but only managing to get covered in more kisses. “Now will ya leave us alone? I think we’re about to build a large pile of animals to get pushed around.”

“Of course, who am I to intrude on your playtime?” Even with saying that, Maribelle didn’t leave, instead crouching down so that she could get Yarne’s attention. Her hands moving slowly once he was watching her, she signed something towards him that he grinned at, giving her a quick response that made her laugh. “I think Yarne wants you to bury him in the animals once you’ve built your pile, if you don’t mind doing that for him.”

“Don’t mind at all, thanks for that, Ma.” Waving her off but watching as she still stayed there, communicating with Yarne in a way that he couldn’t understand, Brady went back to organizing the animals how they had been doing it all along, just for Yarne to destroy the order the moment Maribelle wasn’t looking anymore. From there, it did become a game of burying his brother, hearing the laughter the boy gave once he was fully covered and taking it as a sign that he was okay, that he was enjoying what he was doing, and that he was actually having fun doing what they were doing.

“I…like this,” a meek voice said under the pile of animals, surprising Brady as he’d never heard Yarne say anything before, but then he remembered that Ricken had mentioned that he could apparently speak but no one had heard it. “You are a…good friend, brother.”

Unsure of how he was supposed to reply, Brady took in a deep breath before uncovering Yarne’s face and standing over him, facing him so that he could be seen speaking. “I think you could just call me a good brother and it’d be the same, but I’m glad ya like what we’re doin’! I was worried that you wouldn’t like time with me ‘cause I can’t sign at ya.”

Although Yarne’s eyes were shifting back and forth as he thought about how to respond, he ultimately said nothing in return, nor did he try signing anything. He just smiled, a feeling a peace overtaking him as he’d been able to finally tell his brother how he felt about their time together in a way that he didn’t usually communicate. They finished up playing not long after that, leaving the animals all over the floor without any attempt at cleaning them up, and walked down to the living room one after the other to see what the adults were up to. “Hello, boys,” Maribelle greeted when she saw them enter, signing at Yarne so that he could understand her when she wasn’t sure he could see her lips. “What are you doing out here? Did playtime come to an end?”

“We just wanted to see what you were doin’, we were gettin' tired of playing and needed something else to do,” Brady answered, while Yarne went right to in front of the chair that Ricken was sitting in, taking a seat in front of it while facing his father and grinning up at him. “Also I think Yarne wanted to spend time with someone else, since he’d only been with me since he got here.”

“Well, we’re always happy to spend time with him when he’s here.” Reaching out to ruffle Yarne’s messy hair, Ricken laughed when the boy grabbed his arm and held his hand down to his head to continue doing what he was doing. “I can’t help but think he’s starved for attention or something at his mother’s house, with how much he loves being with us when he’s here. Do you think that she’s mistreating him?”

“If she was, the school would have noticed it by now, and as far as I’m aware they haven’t said a word about it.” Maribelle glanced towards her phone, which was sitting on the armrest of the chair she was in, and gave a long sigh. “Do you want me to call someone to see if they’ve seen or heard anything? I have Cordelia’s number easily accessible, she would know if anything was going on with how often Yarne spends time with Nathalie, or of course I could ask Chrom or Robin as well, I know Morgan is close friends with him.”

“No, no, I don’t think it’s the kind of thing where others would notice anything, I think it’s just neglecting him because he can’t hear anything. Which, that reminds me…” Ricken’s voice trailed off as he brought his other hand towards Yarne’s head, checking around one of his ears for something he didn’t seem to find, based on how confused he was. “She insists on him always having a hearing aid on, even though it barely does anything, and he doesn’t have it on at all right now. What’s the chance that she forgot to give him it because she wants to make us look bad?”

At the feel of his father’s hand at his ear, Yarne’s eyes had gone wide and he’d moved to touch his ear as well, just as confused as his father was about it. He signed something towards Maribelle, who pursed her lips together at it. “He says he hasn’t had it all day,” she translated, “which then becomes an issue of that woman’s and not of ours. Whichever of us is responsible for returning him to her, we can bring it up but if it becomes a point at the next custody meeting then we can argue that she’s the one who neglected to let him have it, we didn’t do anything wrong.”

Still standing in the open entryway to the room, Brady shifted uncomfortably on his feet, not ever enjoying this kind of conversation but recognizing that it was a constant in their lives. If it wasn’t about something to do with Yarne’s mother, it was to do with his father, and while he was thankful that this time it wasn’t anything to do with him, it was still bad that they were having to have this kind of talk. That was the downside to living in such a blended family, though, and he accepted it without question most days, this day being one of them. “Brady, my dear, why don’t you come sit somewhere and act like you’re part of the family?” Just like that, Maribelle brought him back to the reality that this family was quite different from all the other ones he knew, and the feeling of not being part of the family was a real issue he could have been facing.

“I don’t know if I wanna sit,” he said without thinking much about why it was that he felt that way, until he looked at the chair his mother was gesturing towards and realized that he knew exactly why he wanted to avoid sitting in it. The thing had a high back, which was normally very comfortable to relax in, but after being tackled to the ground by a vengeful girl at the school event he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to make sitting there work. “Don’t worry Ma, me standin’ isn’t that big of a problem.”

“But you usually love sitting there, it’s always been your special chair here.” A firmness was starting to appear in her voice, and Brady knew what was coming next: Maribelle pointing towards the chair and demanding that he sit there and enjoy it. Because he knew what would happen if he continued resisting, he sighed and made his way over to the spot, sitting so that his shoulders weren’t touching the chair at all. “That isn’t how a proper man sits, Brady, do as you’ve been taught as sit up straight.”

Hesitating wasn’t an option and he was already feeling the pressure his mother’s glare was putting on him, so he carefully sat back and tried his best to not show any kind of discomfort when his back touched the chair. Even though he hadn’t had a chance to look at his back since he’d gotten home, he was certain there were at least some bruises that he was now pushing up against. “I don’t know, Maribelle, it doesn’t look like he’s enjoying sitting there very much,” Ricken said, watching everything unfold before him even as he was still playing with Yarne’s hair.

“I’m noticing this as well, but it would be very unlike him to not tell us something’s wrong.” He hated that his mother could read him like a book, he hated that she was catching on to everything without him saying a word, and he hated that he knew he was going to crack under the pressure of telling her what had happened; of course, he _had_ planned on telling her everything anyway, just not in that particular situation. “Come now, tell us what happened to you, Brady. We promise that whatever you say will stay here between the three of us, since Yarne can’t hear what we’re talking about.”

Most of all, though, he hated that she said things like that, because it was never as simple as him telling her something and her not doing anything about it. Maribelle was definitely one of those super-protective busybody mothers, and her connections to both the parents of other children his age and prominent figures in local law meant that anything she heard that she did not like, she could get it taken care of. The kicker to this particular issue, which this wasn’t the first instance of something like this happening to Brady, was that she had spent a lot of time trying to put a stop to this behavior, but it had yet to work. “I, uh, got tackled today at the school outing, nothin’ big,” he finally admitted, hunching over once more to get his shoulders off the chair despite his mother’s disdain for him doing that. “Just kids playin’ around and havin’ fun, I didn’t do anything wrong, I promise.”

“Who was it?” Maribelle asked, voice still very firm as she wanted answers and she wanted them right away. “I’ll let the staff at the school know that they have a student who was physically assaulted and—”

“It wasn’t anyone who goes there, Ma, you know who tackled me already. She does it every time she sees me, this ain’t new.” Seeing his mother tense up at what he’d said, he knew that she was already formulating a plan of attack for how to handle the situation, but when he saw her hand shoot towards her phone he screamed out, “No, Ma! You aren’t callin’ anyone about this, I don’t wanna see anyone get in trouble over it!”

“I am tired of you having to tell me that some brat, who’s been taught to hate you for no reason at all, keeps tackling and injuring you any chance she gets. Her parents need to teach her to respect people older than her, and not to bully people just because she thinks she has a size advantage over them.” As she was speaking Maribelle was punching something into her phone, but set it down after a moment rather than making a call. “There, I think we will have handled this swiftly and justly this time.”

His heart was racing in his chest as he thought of all the possible things she’d done, but it was Ricken who spoke before he had the chance to. “Please tell me you didn’t just send out a message to the mom group you’re part of,” he said, watching her mouth curl into a smirk in response. “Oh Maribelle, you know that doing that ends badly every single time. How are you even still in that?”

“I have my ways of retaining membership, especially as I’m the only mother in there who gets things done on the regular.” Already her phone was going off with notifications, replies to her message that had her cackling in glee while everyone else in the room watched her in slight horror of what she’d caused. “You know, after enough tries of getting this taken care of, I hope that this will finally end our problems. I have no idea why that girl thinks she has the right to bully my child, but if she wants to do that, I’ll gladly take action against her.”

“She tackled me ‘cause me and Owain were tryin’ to sneak out of the event.” Voice cracking as he came clean about the reason for the attack, Brady expected his mother to lose her mind on him and start yelling about how he’d pushed her to take action only to not have told the full truth in the first place. Instead, he was met with a glance that didn’t seem to be too angry with him at all. “Er, are you gonna yell at me now, Ma?”

“Nonsense, Brady, I wouldn’t yell at you for doing something Lissa and I did all the time when I’d accompany her to those events back in the day. There is only so much student bonding you can force without people wanting to get away. At least we were able to do it without issue, as the one time we were caught, Emmeryn forgave us immediately.” Falling silent at the recollection of the memory, Maribelle looked back to her phone and dismissed all the notifications she had received. “I’ll handle the herd of mothers later, right now I believe we should make plans for the rest of the night. Does going out for dinner sound like a good idea right now?”

She was obviously trying to cheer herself up after thinking a bit too long about what she’d remembered, and no one was going to deny her that opportunity. “We can take the time to celebrate having both boys with us for the first time in a while,” Ricken said, trying to give some strength to Maribelle’s suggestion, and hearing him back her up made her perk up a bit, although she was still bothered by her memory. “Here, let’s decide where we want to go and then get ready to leave, I think everyone but you would need to change into something nicer before we go.”

“I don’t care where it is we go, I’ll just go ahead and get outta these clothes now while you’re figurin’ it out.” Getting out of the chair as fast as he could, Brady didn’t wait for either adult in the room to say what he was doing was acceptable before he was back down the hallway to his bedroom. He opened the door, let himself in, and closed it tightly behind him, before covering his face with his hands and sighing. “Great, I didn’t tell Ma the full truth, she started some fights, and now we’re gonna go out and have a family dinner to talk about how bad of a kid I am. Why doesn’t she just ship me away for good, it’ll make everythin’ so much easier to handle around here.”

He looked around the room at his dirty clothes strewn everywhere, all of his belongings disorganized and scattered all over the floor, his bed the only clear spot in the room but looking like it hadn’t been made in weeks. He was aware that his lack of cleanliness was something he had been taught to avoid, but he couldn’t help that he just didn’t care about making things look nice. On the mirror he had hanging on his wall, he had pictures of him and Owain, or him and Yarne, taped up so that very little of the mirror itself was usable, yet as he stood there he could still see just enough of his face in the reflection to scowl at it.

There must have been something that went wrong with him, because he looked nothing like either of his parents, who were able to be considered good-looking people, and he hated whenever he saw his face, with his rough features and the ugly scar he had that crossed one eye, from an accident when he was little. His appearance was so different from theirs that people had always joked that maybe his father wasn’t who his mother claimed it was, despite him more matching his father in looks than he’d ever matched his mother, even when he was little and hadn’t grown to be rather physically intimidating. Not that his father was intimidating, of course, but he was a well-built man who would realistically have a well-built son in his shadow.

Thinking about his father made him remember that it was entirely possible that he’d catch word of what had happened to him at the school event and try to settle things on his own, despite there not being any need for anyone else to get involved. His scowl deepened, and he turned his face away from the mirror to change into some clothes that weren’t stained by the grass, taking the time to inspect his back and see the slightly discolored marks that would certainly become bruises overnight. “Great, just great, now if Ma sees these she’s really gonna be out for blood, and she doesn’t need to be,” he grumbled, pulling his shirt on over his head. “I wonder if I could make it seem like they’re old bruises, but I don’t know how I’d make that one work.”

The only possibility that had any chance of success that was coming to mind was blaming the marks on something that had happened in gym class, but the mere thought of creating that lie was enough to make shivers shoot down his spine. He knew his mother had his schedule memorized, she knew where he was for every period of the day and which teacher he had when, and if he so much as started to say that he’d gotten hurt in gym, she would personally go make sure he got some kind of payback for the injuries. “I’m just gonna hope she doesn’t see my back until this is healed, and if she does that she knows it’s probably my fault for bein’ so big and awkward and hittin’ the ground so hard.”

When he was finishing getting his shirt on, the door to the room came unlatched and was slowly pushed open, Yarne standing in the doorway with a hesitant expression on his face. He didn’t sign anything towards Brady, nor did he seem to want anything from him at all, but he waited until he was properly acknowledged with a wave to smile back. “You’re not supposed to be in here, y’know,” Brady told him, not actually minding that he was there at all. “What do ya want from me?”

Fingers and hands moving to explain the situation in a way he wasn’t going to understand, Yarne abruptly stopped making his motions and furrowed his brows looking at Brady. “You…don’t speak signs,” he stated, voice just as slow and meek as it had been back in his own bedroom. For being someone who couldn’t hear but just a tiny bit with assistance (and even that was debatable), he had a relatively strong grasp on the words he was using when he was speaking. “You are still a good brother.”

“You came in here just to tell me that ya still think I’m good even if I can’t talk to ya the way you wanna talk to me? That’s sweet of ya, but don’t ya think you shouldn’t be talkin’ so much? What if your dad or Ma hear ya? They’ll never let you live it down.” It was natural for Brady to be looking out for his mother’s involvement in something, she controlled so many aspects of his life and always had. “And what about your mom, huh? Does she hear ya talk?”

Yarne shook his head, signing once more for a moment before stopping and turning his head down so he wasn’t looking towards his stepbrother. “Not around adults,” he said, each word forcefully given, and when he was done he lifted his head back up and scowled, signing something that he wasn’t ashamed to get off his chest to an audience that couldn’t understand it; when he was done he stomped a foot down on the ground, turned around, and bounced out of the room as if nothing strange had happened at all.

Like everything else in his life, it _was_ strange and Brady wasn’t going to question it even slightly. If Yarne wanted to communicate solely through signs with almost everyone, but use his voice around the few that he felt deserved it, there was no reason to try and stop him. Instead of dwell on why that might have been something Yarne felt was necessary to do, he decided that he was going to rejoin the adults and get going to wherever it was they were going to dine out that night, feeling that something even stranger was going to happen whenever they got there.

After all, it was a meal with his family, and his mother had just angered a group of moms by trying to defend her son from bullying. Something was bound to go wrong for them, even if they were all going to pretend nothing would.

* * *

The dinner itself went fine, the restaurant that Maribelle had decided on taking them to wasn’t busy and they were able to all dine in peace, even with her constantly looking at her phone and laughing at what havoc she’d created in that conversation. It wasn’t until they were on their way home that the first sign of something not going according to her plan showed up, that being that she got called by someone asking her where she was and what she thought she was going to accomplish by starting drama in a text chat.

In the backseat of the car, Brady shifted uncomfortably when he heard his mother explain that they were on their way home and that she was “working on setting someone right” with what she’d done. He didn’t know who it was she was speaking to, but he knew that they weren’t going to be happy about that being her mindset about what she’d done, and he could only worry about what this was going to cause. “Don’t look so sad back there,” Ricken said as he looked at the boys in the rearview mirror, cracking a smile when he saw Brady look up at him. “Everything’s going to be fine, it always ends up fine, we just have to hope no one decides they want to fight her over this.”

“No one will fight me, they’re so focused on maintaining their images that they’ll just tell me to stop being so protective and leave it at that,” she replied, hanging up on whoever she was talking to and giving a content sigh as she leaned her seat back, nearly pushing it into Yarne’s legs and only stopping when he forcefully knocked one of his knees up into it to jostle her. “I mean, think about the ladies that are in that conversation and think about how they’d never dare pick a fight with someone who could work the law against them. Doing what I did earlier is safe in that group and that’s the end of discussing it.”

While Brady knew that trusting in his mother’s affirmation was what she wanted him to do, he couldn’t help but doubt what she’d just said. There wasn’t any way that what she’d done, under the guise of getting justice for him, wouldn’t end in some fight or conflict that would make him regret opening his mouth about what had happened to him at the school. Telling his mother anything always ended up in this same what-if situation, wondering if this was going to be the time that someone rightfully came and put her in her place for starting fights without needing to.

Based on how there were two cars outside the house that didn’t belong to anyone in the family when they got home, it seemed like it actually was the time for a blowout confrontation over what Maribelle had said. But when they’d parked and gotten out of their car, her in the process of unlocking the front door while the others waited around her, the people in the other cars were emerging as well, and none of them were the mother (or child, since there were kids getting out) that had gotten called out in the chat. “Maribelle, what was that all about?” Robin’s voice loudly asked, as she slammed the door to the car she’d been driving, grabbing Morgan’s hand before leading him up towards the front of the house, the boy seeming to be distracted by something and not paying any attention to where he was. “We had to talk her down from coming to rip you a new one, it was nothing short of a disaster because of you deciding to be so difficult!”

“I wasn’t aware that you were going to play guardian for me,” Maribelle replied, trying not to focus on the child being led towards her boys but rather on the mother leading him there. “You know I’m a grown woman, I don’t always need you protecting me. Not like I’d need much more than the law on my side if she came here to start anything.”

“Your tirade in the conversation ruined our family game night.” It was the other woman who’d arrived on-scene before they had, but rather than just one child with her she had two, one walking in front of her and one trailing behind. “We were just about to start winding down with a fun round of go fish when Robin asked me if I would meet her here, and if I would bring the girls with me.”

“Cordelia speaks the truth, but when I asked her to bring them I thought they’d be able to hang out with Morgan and Brady for us while we all discussed what went wrong with what you did, but I wasn’t aware that Yarne was already here.” At his mother’s mention of the boy, Morgan finally noticed that there were other kids around, in specific Yarne, and he asked if he could go play with his friend without waiting for an answer before he was out of his mother’s grasp and running straight to Yarne’s side. “Okay, let’s put all the kids inside before we get to business, I suppose. Ricken, would you mind leading them in?”

Not even caring what his stepfather said or did right then, Brady opened the front door and left it ajar, only to go down the hall to his bedroom and slam that door behind him once he was there. Now there were other people involved with what his mother had done, and it was all his fault that she’d done it in the first place. On top of that, Cordelia had brought _Severa_ with her, and she was going to come into his room at any moment, without invitation, and start badgering him about whatever she knew about the situation, which would result in her knowing more than she should and probably gossiping about him all week at school.

He heard the other kids go into the room across the hall, Morgan loudly talking about something to who he was with, despite only one of them actually behind able to hear him, and once that door closed he was hearing a lot quieter version of that voice. That changed when his own door came open and Severa walked in, looking grim-faced as she invited herself into the bedroom without even bothering to care if he wanted her there or not. “I cannot believe your dumb mother made my mom stop forcing us to play ‘family game night’ with her so that she could come be part of the drama,” she said, flopping down onto his bed as he watched her, not saying a word. “Nah was upset that we didn’t get to play the game she picked, but it’s a stupid baby game. I’m more than fine with not playing.”

“Why’re ya in here?” he finally managed to ask, knocking his door closed because he knew that she wouldn’t leave even if he told her to. “And better yet, why’re ya here? I’m sure you could’ve stayed home with your dad, you didn’t haveta come here to be with me.”

“Oh Brady, did you really think I showed up to come spend time with you?” Even though she sounded upset that it was suggested, Severa’s face was coming alight with color, clearly embarrassed about the idea. “Y-you aren’t really worth my free time, just saying. I came to be part of the drama too, but then I got told I had to come inside. Your stepdad did say I could hang with him but he’s just a lame old guy, I’m not going to waste my time there.”

“He’s not old and he’s not lame, he’s into a lot of stuff that I like.” It wasn’t until he’d already said it that Brady realized that Severa most likely found everything he liked lame, which would translate to what Ricken liked as well. “I mean, I’m sure ya don’t care about that or anythin’, now that I think about it.”

She shrugged, rolling over on his bed so that her face was able to be buried in the pillow, which she did before she explained herself. “Okay, he didn’t actually invite me to hang with him, I wanted to spend time with you in here, just because you’re not half bad. I just…didn’t want to come out and say that, since I’m pretty sure you already knew I tolerated you.”

“Based on how you’re always draggin’ me away from my friends? Yeah, I already knew it.” She was still laying on the bed which meant he couldn’t sit there, so he awkwardly stood at the door, opening it slightly just in case one of the adults came to see what he was doing. “I just don’t get ya sometimes, Severa. You’re such a bully to my friends but ya actually like me, why’s that?”

“Can we not get into that, please? I just don’t even want to talk about either of them right now, not when we’ve got this time together.” For being so focused on their “time together” it seemed that Severa didn’t actually care at all, since she was still laying face-down on the bed, her voice muffled every time she spoke. That was fine by Brady, the less he had to look at her the better in his mind, but there was still something very, very weird about her being there right then and her explanation for it.

Rather than deal with it right then, he figured that he could come back to it at some point in the future and handle it when necessary; that meant that he remained locked in his room with her for what felt like forever, until Cordelia was at the door asking for her to please emerge so that they could go home. They hadn’t said a single word to each other beyond her asking him not to talk about his friends, but as Severa left she made sure to thank Brady for being so kind to her while she was there, winking at him as she walked out of the room. He was left confused at what she was getting at and with no desire to figure it out for himself, not right then.

Once it was just the family at the house, Maribelle rounded the boys up to tell them what had happened while she’d been outside with Cordelia and Robin, just so that they knew the full story of everything. Immediately Yarne showed no interest in having adult drama signed to him so he asked if he could go do something else instead, a request that was granted because it meant that signing every thought wasn’t going to be necessary. “I hope you know that you don’t have any easy way out of this,” she told Brady as they both watched Yarne go back towards his room, Ricken following him so that they could get some time together. “And, before you ask, yes your father knows about what happened to you and he knows about everyone’s reactions to it.”

“Great, bet him and Sumia had a good time laughing about it.” This whole thing was a mess and Brady just wanted it to be over, he could put up with being bullied by someone younger than him for the rest of his life if it meant he wouldn’t have to deal with his mother’s quest for vengeance ever again. “But what do ya wanna tell me now, huh? All about what you and the other ladies were talkin’ about?”

“Apparently what we should do to handle this is invite them over and force us all to interact to learn to get along. I said I would never let that girl under my roof if she’s intentionally hurting my baby, and they got upset that I wouldn’t change my stance.” Maribelle huffed a long breath before shaking her head. “Eventually it got to the point where Robin suggested we do this at her place, where there will be multiple bystanders who could restrain anyone who starts picking a fight, and I suppose I went along with it to get her off my back.”

“Her off your back, just ‘cause she wants Kjelle to get back on mine to beat me up again, I got it.” He didn’t truly believe that would happen if this meeting took place, especially if there were enough people around to keep them all separated, but Brady had zero interest in going along with his mother’s plan. “I’ll do it if ya make me, but I’m not really interested in goin’ through with this. She’s been bullyin’ me since we were little kids, it isn’t gonna change just because all you adults got involved.”

“Always so negative, Brady. When will you learn to see things a little differently, or maybe the positive side of anything?” It was funny to hear that coming from the woman who’d just waged war against someone in a group conversation for mothers, but he wasn’t going to call her out on it. In their particular situation, everyone directly involved had a little bit of a terrible streak running through them, and that was never going to fade away.

And if he was looking at it positively, maybe there’d come a day in the far future when all of this would be completely behind everyone and he’d be able to actually get along with Kjelle? He doubted it, but at the same time, he was fairly confident he knew how it would happen if it did, and her name was Severa. The very same Severa who was clearly fascinated with him while hating everyone he liked.

Something told him that she was going to be the key to a lot of things for him in life, whether he wanted her to be or not.


End file.
